I also agree with your approach, John. Based on your criteria, here are some other things to consider for the chopping block.
- expression-based indexing - NamedArray (you already have an issue on this) - with, within, based_on and variants - @transform, @DataFrame - select, filter - DataStream Many of these were attempts to ease syntax via delayed evaluation. We can either do without or try to implement something like LINQ. On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 7:02 PM, Kevin Squire <kevin.squ...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi John, > > I agree with pretty much everything you have written here, and really > appreciate that you've taken the lead in cleaning things up and getting us > on track. > > Cheers! > Kevin > > > On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 1:57 PM, John Myles White <johnmyleswh...@gmail.com> > wrote: >> >> As I said in another thread recently, I am currently the lead maintainer >> of more packages than I can keep up with. I think it’s been useful for me to >> start so many different projects, but I can’t keep maintaining most of my >> packages given my current work schedule. >> >> Without Simon Kornblith, Kevin Squire, Sean Garborg and several others >> doing amazing work to keep DataArrays and DataFrames going, much of our >> basic data infrastructure would have already become completely unusable. But >> even with the great work that’s been done on those package recently, there’s >> still lot of additional design work required. I’d like to free up some of my >> time to do that work. >> >> To keep things moving forward, I’d like to propose a couple of radical New >> Year’s resolutions for the packages I work on. >> >> (1) We need to stop adding functionality and focus entirely on improving >> the quality and documentation of our existing functionality. We have way too >> much prototype code in DataFrames that I can’t keep up with. I’m about to >> make a pull request for DataFrames that will remove everything related to >> column groupings, database-style indexing and Blocks.jl support. I >> absolutely want to see us push all of those ideas forward in the future, but >> they need to happen in unmerged forks or separate packages until we have the >> resources needed to support them. Right now, they make an overwhelming >> maintenance challenge even more onerous. >> >> (2) We can’t support anything other than the master branch of most >> JuliaStats packages except possibly for Distributions. I personally don’t >> have the time to simultaneously keep stuff working with Julia 0.2 and Julia >> 0.3. Moreover, many of our basic packages aren’t mature enough to justify >> supporting older versions. We should do a better job of supporting our >> master releases and not invest precious time trying to support older >> releases. >> >> (3) We need to make more of DataArrays and DataFrames reflect the Julian >> worldview. Lots of our code uses an interface that is incongruous with the >> interfaces found in Base. Even worse, a large chunk of code has >> type-stability problems that makes it very slow, when comparable code that >> uses normal Arrays is 100x faster. We need to develop new idioms and new >> strategies for making code that interacts with type-destabilizing NA’s >> faster. More generally, we need to make DataArrays and DataFrames fit in >> better with Julia when Julia and R disagree. Following R’s lead has often >> lead us astray because R doesn’t share Julia’s strenths or weaknesses. >> >> (4) Going forward, there should be exactly one way to do most things. The >> worst part of our current codebase is that there are multiple ways to >> express the same computation, but (a) some of them are unusably slow and (b) >> some of them don’t ever get tested or maintained properly. This is closely >> linked to the excess proliferation of functionality described in Resolution >> 1 above. We need to start removing stuff from our packages and making the >> parts we keep both reliable and fast. >> >> I think we can push DataArrays and DataFrames to 1.0 status by the end of >> this year. But I think we need to adopt a new approach if we’re going to get >> there. Lots of stuff needs to get deprecated and what remains needs a lot >> more testing, benchmarking and documentation. >> >> — John >> >
