Jax vs. Julia (Vs PyTorch)

Why should reading a paper on stochastic gradient optimization be a prerequisite to understanding your idiosyncratic choices for identifiers? The fact of the matter is that I can understand code much better than acedemic prose. I'll learn the code and then supplement with the paper as needed. By using idiosyncratic identifiers you're gating off your code from people who haven't jumped through the same specific hoops you have and have the same mental muscles you have developed.

> It is bikeshedding because it is analogous to insisting that using "angle" instead of "θ", or "radius" instead of "r" in a 2D geometry library is superior and takes your code from being a lackluster to something that shines (in the words of the original author), while not having anything useful to say anything about the mathematical/technical aspects of the code itself.

No. To someone who doesn't have an established mental muscle for mathematical notation it is analgous to using thai script to write for an audience that primarily reads english: I can still use google translate, but the cognitive load is much higher to members of the audience who are native thai. That isn't bikeshedding, that's caring about understandability.

> You are saying most people don't know what η in that context means (=people who likely haven't read a book or a paper on stochastic gradient, and don't know how it actually works), but they would somehow magically figure out what it actually does if we call it "learning_rate" in ASCII letters. How does that work?

I learn from code a whole lot faster than I do from acedemic prose. I usually start with code then read the whitepapers the code refers to as I go. I learn slower from code that uses symbology I'm not familiar with. In the context of learning a new code base, unfamiliar symbols are bad in several ways.

> so this is already explicit to anyone who reads the documentation. The quibble in the post is about the named parameter.

My quibble is with the assumptions I think you make about what comprises good code quality while at the same time having suffered through code from people who share your attitudes. Naming matters to me in more ways than you're apparently versed with. The article I linked is just one small discussion on naming but not comprehensive by any means. I was linking it more in hopes that you would do further thinking of your own about a pretty wide subject. Just my opinion.

Furthermore, the page on FluxML demonstrates the problem I'm referring to. Just down from where you linked you'll find an entry like `RMSProp(η = 0.001, ρ = 0.9, ϵ = 1.0e-8)` in which `ϵ` is described nowhere in the entry. It's a random symbol that I understand to be used usually in set membership notation, but in this context (the context of some random link some random person posted in the interwebs) I have no clue what it means and thus it is a barrier to my understanding.

And

> First of all, it’s not in the Flux documentation. Instead it’s in the documentation for a separate component library – Zygote. So you have to check both, and you have to know to check both.

People love to rave about how the julia ecosystem is made up of tons of tiny composable libraries instead of large monolithic libraries like scipy. To me, that sounds like a major headache, and the quotes above are partly why. I'd rather read docs for one library than two. The chances that the maintainers of a large monolithic library break internal compatibility is way smaller than the chance that two disconnected projects become incompatible.

> so this is already explicit to anyone who reads the documentation. The quibble in the post is about the named parameter.

As far as I can tell it's a documentation complaint. He has to remember "η" from the line with the signature, past the line "Gradient descent optimizer with learning rate η ...", and a heading "Parameters" until the line quoted which explains this in full.

He says this is the API, but that's inaccurate. The API being explained is that the first positional argument is the learning rate. It's not a keyword argument, so you cannot supply it by name. What variable names are used in the code is private, and in fact the struct's field name is `eta` so that you can access it without typing greek.

If this makes the top 10 list (even the top 10 list of documentation complaints) then Flux is doing OK. Especially the top 10 list of a guy with a PhD in a mathematical field. (From the sort of university which used to require students to know latin & greek, too.)