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Federal Reserve Bank of NY converts major economic model to Julia

libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org

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Re: Federal Reserve Bank of NY converts major economic model to Julia

#81

Post by baldfat »

krapht wrote: post #66
mikeskim wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do all of those things in R except maybe Simulink with a GUI (at least not yet, maybe soon?), and you have the choice of working with multiple implementations. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/FKF/FKF.pdf https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/stats/html/Kal... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1738087/what-can-matlab-d... Unless you are doing something very specific and require a specific tool…

I can't disagree more with a blanket statement like that. I would never recommend Python / R to the physicists and scientists that I work with. They don't know how to program well. The code they put out is usually garbage, hard to read, and fragile. Software development is not something they do. Backing up for them is emailing themselves a .zip file of their work and revision control is saving their DocXs and PPTs wi…

Open Source always wins in the end. Matlab is not a good solution due to its closed propitiatory nature and the need for science to be shared. We see the cracks in the walls on Journals and Research behind closed walls. The code and the tools for science also needs to be free from a closed system.

Re: Federal Reserve Bank of NY converts major economic model to Julia

#82

Post by simonster »

krapht wrote: post #66
mikeskim wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do all of those things in R except maybe Simulink with a GUI (at least not yet, maybe soon?), and you have the choice of working with multiple implementations. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/FKF/FKF.pdf https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/stats/html/Kal... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1738087/what-can-matlab-d... Unless you are doing something very specific and require a specific tool…

I can't disagree more with a blanket statement like that. I would never recommend Python / R to the physicists and scientists that I work with. They don't know how to program well. The code they put out is usually garbage, hard to read, and fragile. Software development is not something they do. Backing up for them is emailing themselves a .zip file of their work and revision control is saving their DocXs and PPTs wi…

If journals ever demand code that reviewers can read (as they should IMO; who knows whether hard to read garbage is actually doing what they claim it is in the methods section, and the call for reproducibility in science is getting stronger), then academics might be forced to learn to code. And then they might want to use a programming language that's more conducive to readable code.

I don't think MATLAB toolboxes are a huge obstacle. Maybe something like the Aerospace Toolbox is useful for people in aerospace. But for people in my field (neuroscience), people end up writing their own code for their various applications anyway, because the MATLAB toolboxes are too slow or too inflexible for their use cases. The source of inertia is that everyone uses MATLAB, so they end up writing the code in MATLAB. While it takes time to overcome an established userbase, I think it will happen eventually if the alternatives have substantial technical advantages, as I believe Julia does. It only takes a handful of technically skilled people to reproduce the majority of the code in common use, and if there are good reasons for those people to write that code in Julia and for others to use that Julia code, then Julia will eventually take over.

Re: Federal Reserve Bank of NY converts major economic model to Julia

#83

Post by bsg75 »

has2k1 wrote: post #45

I like the use of the Greek alphabet in the code base. Examples https://github.com/FRBNY-DSGE/DSGE.jl/blob/master/src/solve/... https://github.com/FRBNY-DSGE/DSGE.jl/blob/master/src/solve/...

Doesn't this make the code more difficult to work with, sine these characters require uncommon sequences of keystrokes?

Single character Greek variables don't seem better than single character ASCII for readability.

Re: Federal Reserve Bank of NY converts major economic model to Julia

#84

Post by oneJob »

jordigh wrote: post #20
chollida1 wrote: post #2

Cool, despite Julia replacing matlab here, it looks like the biggest loser to Julia's rise might be Octave. Matlab will always have its proponents, that will use it no matter what, but if Julia keeps encroaching on this territory, I'm not sure where that leaves Ocatve. To the model discussed in this paper, check out this series of blog posts for more information: http://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2014/09/f…

> it looks like the biggest loser to Julia's rise might be Octave. It's not a competition. Julia is our friend, not a rival to Octave. We're on good terms with their developers. Occasionally we share ideas and patches back and forth when it makes sense. They've asked me for help with their Octave benchmark and I've gladly provided it. Octave being unnecessary is Octave's ultimate goal. When nobody cares about Matlab,…

Respectfully, maybe it should be a (friendly) competition. Competition motivates people. It's commonly accepted as one of the central drivers of capitalist markets. Perhaps if competition were injected in open source projects in some form it'd help the open source community compete with the proprietary community.

Re: Federal Reserve Bank of NY converts major economic model to Julia

#85

Post by tavert »

bsg75 wrote: post #83
has2k1 wrote: post #45

I like the use of the Greek alphabet in the code base. Examples https://github.com/FRBNY-DSGE/DSGE.jl/blob/master/src/solve/... https://github.com/FRBNY-DSGE/DSGE.jl/blob/master/src/solve/...

Doesn't this make the code more difficult to work with, sine these characters require uncommon sequences of keystrokes? Single character Greek variables don't seem better than single character ASCII for readability.

Julia's REPL, and many editor plugins, supports tab-completion of unicode characters via their LaTeX code names, e.g. \alpha

Re: Federal Reserve Bank of NY converts major economic model to Julia

#86

Post by baldfat »

krapht wrote: post #64
Hansi wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry you are wrong especially about your first example. For the other two yes there aren't built in toolboxes to handle those but it can be done. R has a lot of packages + it's a language so anyone can effectively write anything: https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/

I can write anything to do any computation in any programming language. The whole point is that there are pre-existing, high quality libraries and toolboxes to do these operations. In fact, that is exactly why R is popular - it has excellent libraries for handling data and statistics. You're right. R does in fact have a library for modeling Kalman filters. My mistake! Let me pick any other example from the Matlab too…

This is a 404 Error http://www.mathworks.com/discovery/matlab-vs-python.html

This is an actual working link. http://www.mathworks.com/discovery/matlab-vs-r.html

And the lets see what is on Stack Overflow. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1738087/what-can-matlab-d...

Re: Federal Reserve Bank of NY converts major economic model to Julia

#87

Post by jordigh »

oneJob wrote: post #84
jordigh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it looks like the biggest loser to Julia's rise might be Octave. It's not a competition. Julia is our friend, not a rival to Octave. We're on good terms with their developers. Occasionally we share ideas and patches back and forth when it makes sense. They've asked me for help with their Octave benchmark and I've gladly provided it. Octave being unnecessary is Octave's ultimate goal. When nobody cares about Matlab,…

Respectfully, maybe it should be a (friendly) competition. Competition motivates people. It's commonly accepted as one of the central drivers of capitalist markets. Perhaps if competition were injected in open source projects in some form it'd help the open source community compete with the proprietary community.

We already have fearsome competition: Matlab. We don't need in-fighting within team Free Software.

Re: Federal Reserve Bank of NY converts major economic model to Julia

#88

Post by oneJob »

jordigh wrote: post #87
oneJob wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, maybe it should be a (friendly) competition. Competition motivates people. It's commonly accepted as one of the central drivers of capitalist markets. Perhaps if competition were injected in open source projects in some form it'd help the open source community compete with the proprietary community.

We already have fearsome competition: Matlab. We don't need in-fighting within team Free Software.

Respectfully disagree with the phrase "infighting". I believe healthy competition would be good for OSS.

Re: Federal Reserve Bank of NY converts major economic model to Julia

#89

Post by jordigh »

oneJob wrote: post #88
jordigh wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have fearsome competition: Matlab. We don't need in-fighting within team Free Software.

Respectfully disagree with the phrase "infighting". I believe healthy competition would be good for OSS.

You're applying a broad principle (competition is good) without considering lots of specifics.

First of all, within free software, collaboration is a lot easier than competition. Sure, we should all try to be the best we can be, but if our "competition" is also free, we can just grab their stuff and re-use it. We cannot, however, grab whatever we want from Matlab and re-use it, so we do have to compete against them.

Secondly, even if I agree with you that competition is great even in this case, how do you want me to modify my behaviour? To stop collaborating with Julia? To view them with more suspicion? To refuse to help them when they ask for help?

I already try to match features whenever possible. The feature I'm most envious of is their JIT compiling, but it's very difficult to implement this. Vice versa, I don't think they have a goal to match our features, such as a native Qt GUI or an exact implementation of the Matlab language.

Julia and Octave have lots of ideological differences too. For one, Octave is a GNU package, so it tries to adhere to the GNU coding standards and ideals. In particular, we prefer to call ourselves free software, not open source, even if both terms mean the same thing. I think the most important thing is to enable unfettered scientific computing. Julia's main goal is to provide a better language for scientific computing, while ensuring user freedom is a secondary goal. So far they have not compromised user freedom, and I hope they never do. So, there you have it, we're already competing on something?

Re: Federal Reserve Bank of NY converts major economic model to Julia

#90

Post by [deleted] »

jordigh wrote: post #89
oneJob wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully disagree with the phrase "infighting". I believe healthy competition would be good for OSS.

You're applying a broad principle (competition is good) without considering lots of specifics. First of all, within free software, collaboration is a lot easier than competition. Sure, we should all try to be the best we can be, but if our "competition" is also free, we can just grab their stuff and re-use it. We cannot, however, grab whatever we want from Matlab and re-use it, so we do have to compete against them.…

[deleted]
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