On Sat, Oct 27 2012, Mirko Vukovic mirko.vukovic@gmail.com wrote:
I put up my first draft of numerical lisp on https://github.com/mirkov/numerical-lisp
You will have to clone it and look at the documentation in the doc/developers/index.html.
Comments, feedback, participation welcome.
Hi Mirko,
I have never worked as part of a software development team and I have no formal training in computer science, so I know very little about designing libraries.
That said, I am somewhat skeptical about the idea of first specifying development guidelines, then a detailed user interface, and leaving coding after that. IMO coding in CL is not that costly and is the only way to test the viability of a design. I fear that writing up specifications before code would be wasted effort.
I don't see why you want to achieve everything ("numerical, statistical, visualization, ...") in a single library. That's great if you can pull it off, but I find small, focused projects more manageable. For example, I would break up libraries like this:
- linear algebra - numerical methods - random variates - visualization
(This pretty much follows the structure of the libraries I currently have, so maybe I am biased).
Statistical code beyond simple sample statistics is a very ambitious goal which requires a lot of domain-specific knowledge. I think it is more realistic to just provide the building blocks and let people write their own statistical code.
Best,
Tamas