clojure.core provides a minimal set of functions for random effects: rand, rand-int, and rand-nth, currently with no simple ability to base these on a resettable random number generator or on different RNGs in different threads. (But see this ticket <http://dev.clojure.org/jira/browse/CLJ-1420> pointed out by Andy Fingerhut in another thread.)
data.generators includes additional useful general-purpose functions involving random numbers and random choices, but this is entirely not obvious when you read the docstrings. (Some of the docstrings are pretty mysterious.) It's also not necessarily what one would guess from the name of the library. (None of this is a criticism of anyone or anything about the project. Data.generators is at an 0.n.m release stage. I'm very grateful for the work that people have put in on it.) As I understand it, data.generators was split off from test.generative, which sounds like a good idea.So data.generators was intended to provide functions that generate random data for testing. (I imagine that the existing documentation makes more sense in the context of test.generative, too.) However, what's in data.generator has more general applications, for people who want random numbers, samples, etc. outside of software testing. (In my case, that would be for random effects in scientific simulations.) Off the top of my head, it seems to me that these other applications might have slightly different needs from the use of data.generators by test.generative. For one thing, efficiency might matter a lot in some simulations, but not in software testing. (At least, *I* wouldn't care if my test functions were slow.) I'm not saying that functions in data.generator are slow, but I don't think there's a good reason to worry about making them efficient if they're only intended for software testing. Further, there are other needs than are currently provided by test.generators. See the sampling functions in bigml/sampling <https://github.com/bigmlcom/sampling> or Incanter <http://incanter.org/>, for example, and lots of other random functions that Incanter provides. Some of those should remain in Incanter, of course, but I wonder whether Clojure would benefit from a contributed library that satisfied a set of core needs for random effects. (Incanter partly builds on clojure.core's rand at this point.) Maybe data.generators is/will be that library. Or maybe parts of data.generators would make more sense as part of a separate library (math.random? data.random? math.probability?) that could be split out of data.generators. (If it doesn't make sense to split data.generators, then would a new name for the library be more appropriate?) Just some things I was wondering about. Curious to see what others say. (Fun tip: Check out data.generators' anything function, which is like Emacs' Zippy the Pinhead functions for people who prefer industrial atonal music composed by randomly filtered Jackson Pollock paintings, to speech. Or: People who want to thoroughly test their functions by throwing random randomly-typed data at them.) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
