lindbergh

Right, good point. I just find the structure and the mindset to be similar.

In their definition of programming languages types, I'm not sure I see how SQL which they cateogrize as declarative really differs from FP, especially with lazy evaluation. Both are a succession of functions applied onto a previously declared variable : just think of a long SQL query with many ctes modifying the previous ones; each of them can be thought of as a variable which takes its value from the application of a function on other variable (a bit like the let function in ocaml).

I always thought of LaTeX as being the prime example of declarative programming.

Oh wow that's really impressive. Thanks a lot !

Yes Excel lately is turning into a really compelling product, using functions such as sequence (dynamic arrays), lambda (pure functions) and let (defining sub-variables). You'd think you're coding in a pure functional language, and that's great! Now, ff only Excel had a convolution function! But nonetheless it's a great GUI, everybody knows how to use it and sharing it is dead simple.

The one downside I can find is the lack of a good plotting library. And yes comments as well is something I miss a lot.

Interesting. I heard many good things about Pycharm, but it kind of looks bloated? How does it compare to VS Code (which is quite good (notebook and repl support mostly), but not great, in particular regarding the debugging experience)?

What I wish more newspaper did is to allow one to pay for a single article (whose price could depend on the length/depth of the article).

Well you can manage to run the Wolfram Engine through a jupyter kernel directly in VS Code. Although, I believe when I set it up the output was an image, no matter the object being returned (for instance 2+3 would return an image of 5 black on white).

Totally unrelated since I can't access the website, but one thing that I'd like to see in a typing system used in data analysis is to be able to see the dimension of the data structures used. For instance, to be able to tell at compile time if a matrix multiplication is going to crash due to dimension mismatch.

So far, in Python at least, at best I can tell that it's a float array, without specifying the dimension (for example 2d for a matrix) or better, specifying its dimension is (n,p) where n and p are both type variables.

Kinda did, but mostly the first chapters, actually up to CNN chapter (where real modern DL start). But so far, I really liked what I read. It has a very good blend of code and theory, with hands on applications throughout the whole book. Most importantly, all those applications could perfectly be copy pasted into your own environment. So it actually reminded me of a very thorough tutorial on a framework, more say than a regular textbook, although the authors don't compromise on mathematical arguments (but don't get lost in it either, they skimmed pretty fast on regularization theory imho). If you've had previous exposure to classical ML, I think it's a fantastic introduction to DL, enough to get started.

Python is like democracy. It's the worst programming languages except for all the others.

LaTeX is still one of my favourite piece of technology of all time. It is at time so alien, yet beautiful.

I now get closer to 10+ years of programming experience, yet nothing comes close to debugging a faulty LaTeX custom command... it can quickly turn to an unreadable mess, but you have to admit that once everything is swept under a preamble.tex file, the rest of the code is very clean. Especially with auctex in emacs which displays most math symbols as their true unicode counterpart.

Funny story: one of my first gig was working in a music instruments shop where I was basically the IT guy, from sysadmin to web dev. At some point the software that created the barcode labels stopped working. Now I had to find an automatic way to make those labels, so of course I turned to LaTeX. All I needed to do was to write a batch file calling `pdflatex` with a template tex file and a pdf file for the label was promptly sent to the printer! There is probably some python package for doing the same thing, but I was so proud of seeing Computer Modern font tagged to every instruments in the shop!