Re: [Fwd: saw your comments on hacker news]

[John Swensen]

On Nov 19, 2016, at 9:13 AM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso <address@hidden> wrote:

I posted the new website design on HN. It was nice to receive some fan
mail in response. :-)

- Jordi G. H.

-------- Forwarded Message --------
From: Chris Holliday <address@hidden>
To: address@hidden
Subject: saw your comments on hacker news
Date: Sat, 19 Nov 2016 10:52:39 -0500

I'm chollida1 on hacker news.

I was reading this thread

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12993521

Just wanted to say that we used Ocatve for this course
https://www.coursera.org/learn/neural-networks

and I appreciate the effort that you and your fellow contributors put into
Octave.


Cheers
Chris


<attachment.html>

If wishes were horses….

I wish we could find some language/interpreter expert with lots of time to spend on JIT for Octave. Most discussions I have with students and other researchers who have used Octave in the past (and reiterated in the ycombinator discussion), their complaint has always been the speed of for loops and lack of JIT. The problem is that it really requires pretty much a domain expert on JIT to keep a robust solution always up to date with a language.

See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22703796/time-comparison-of-for-loop-in-matlab-and-octave. I have so little experience with JIT that I don’t even know if it is possible, but even if we could just make sure the for loop portion of execution was somehow JIT’able, I think the apparent speed difference would be much less pronounced.

John S.