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Racket v9.2

blog.racket-lang.org

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Re: Racket v9.2

#11

Post by UncleOxidant »

noosphr wrote: post #9
UncleOxidant wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds kind of amazing. But you're not actually doing the machine learning in Racket, are you? Is your Racket code generating other code like PyTorch?

I'm doing the learning in racket because the bottleneck is human understanding. That mnist takes 30 minutes per epoch isn't a worry when I don't even know what vector addition should look like.

This is a complete tangent, but since you mentioned MNIST: I accidentally discovered Tsetlin machines this week when someone on r/Julia asked if anyone with an AMD GPU could run the benchmark in their package called Tsetlin.jl. I've got an AMD GPU so I was happy to oblige. Then I looked at what the benchmark was doing: it was training an MNIST classifier to 98% accuracy in 9 seconds - that seemed like a couple of orders of magnitude too fast. I was flabbergasted and wondered what the heck this thing was and that's when I learned about Tsetlin machines. I went on (with the help of Claude) to implement one in an FPGA and again was flabbergasted when it only took 2k LUTs to implement a Tsetlin machine for MNIST classification in hardware.

Re: Racket v9.2

#12

Post by noosphr »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #11
noosphr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm doing the learning in racket because the bottleneck is human understanding. That mnist takes 30 minutes per epoch isn't a worry when I don't even know what vector addition should look like.

This is a complete tangent, but since you mentioned MNIST: I accidentally discovered Tsetlin machines this week when someone on r/Julia asked if anyone with an AMD GPU could run the benchmark in their package called Tsetlin.jl. I've got an AMD GPU so I was happy to oblige. Then I looked at what the benchmark was doing: it was training an MNIST classifier to 98% accuracy in 9 seconds - that seemed like a couple of ord…

Well yes, you have to use one of the newer mnist variants these days if you want to get anything meaningful. A linear classifier gets something like 87% on the original one.

Re: Racket v9.2

#13

Post by adamddev1 »

greyb wrote: post #6
montyanne wrote: post #5

Northeastern graduates assemble!

Racket is used across CS programs that have adopted the How to Design Programs book [1] (some schools do not use the original book, just the textbook for source material). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Design_Programs

I was just remembering https://htdp.org fondly yesterday. Working through that book was one of the most wonderful and transformative experiences I've had in programming. I owe so much of my problem solving skills today to that book.

Re: Racket v9.2

#14

Post by imjonse »

adamddev1 wrote: post #13
greyb wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Racket is used across CS programs that have adopted the How to Design Programs book [1] (some schools do not use the original book, just the textbook for source material). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Design_Programs

I was just remembering https://htdp.org fondly yesterday. Working through that book was one of the most wonderful and transformative experiences I've had in programming. I owe so much of my problem solving skills today to that book.

How experienced were you at that time?

Re: Racket v9.2

#15

Post by submeta »

I used a predecessor of this almost thirty years ago to learn Scheme and work trough the book SICP. The Racket maintainers still ship updates and new features, that’s remarkable.

Scheme is a wonderful lisp dialect. It taught me basics of functional programming, about closures, about tail call recursion, about functions always returning values (which annoyed me a lot when I started learning Python, where .append or .sort returened `none` instead of the list, and were destructive).

So I have very fond memories of Racket (then DrScheme) and Scheme. Had also written my matrix multiplication library and my CAS system to mimic the functionality of my HP28s calculator.

Have to look into it again.

Re: Racket v9.2

#17

Post by mathisfun123 »

noosphr wrote: post #9
UncleOxidant wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds kind of amazing. But you're not actually doing the machine learning in Racket, are you? Is your Racket code generating other code like PyTorch?

I'm doing the learning in racket because the bottleneck is human understanding. That mnist takes 30 minutes per epoch isn't a worry when I don't even know what vector addition should look like.

> I don't even know what vector addition should look like.

I think you're trying to imply you're inventing something new and racket enables you to explore... But what I read (as someone with a PhD in deep learning that has worked on sparsity) is you actually don't know the prior art and you're using racket as an excuse to reinvent a whole bunch of stuff that already exists in plenty of mature libraries in more mundane languages (including python/pytorch). Which is of course fine for personal growth but please don't oversell racket as a "superpower" - to wit I can manipulate any part of my stack too because it's all written in cpp.

Re: Racket v9.2

#18

Post by fn-mote »

imjonse wrote: post #14
adamddev1 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just remembering https://htdp.org fondly yesterday. Working through that book was one of the most wonderful and transformative experiences I've had in programming. I owe so much of my problem solving skills today to that book.

How experienced were you at that time?

HtDP is an introductory textbook. It shouldn’t have new material for someone who has 2 years worth of experience.

That said, while I didn’t learn content from it, the exposition of their process was excellent. It really influenced my “personal software process” a lot. Also, it gave me a lot of tools for informal postmortems that I reach for when mentoring junior colleagues.

The book’s taxonomy of the different kinds of recursion helped me see what others found difficult about it.

Background: I liked SICP but HtDP made it easier to see the content as one unified subject instead of a bunch of tricky/interesting individual exercises.

Re: Racket v9.2

#20

Post by [deleted] »

mathisfun123 wrote: post #17
noosphr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm doing the learning in racket because the bottleneck is human understanding. That mnist takes 30 minutes per epoch isn't a worry when I don't even know what vector addition should look like.

> I don't even know what vector addition should look like. I think you're trying to imply you're inventing something new and racket enables you to explore... But what I read (as someone with a PhD in deep learning that has worked on sparsity) is you actually don't know the prior art and you're using racket as an excuse to reinvent a whole bunch of stuff that already exists in plenty of mature libraries in more mundan…

[deleted]
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