Hi, On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 12:39 PM, <josef.p...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 3:04 PM, Matthew Brett <matthew.br...@gmail.com> > wrote: >> >> Hi, >> >> On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 7:09 AM, Alan G Isaac <alan.is...@gmail.com> >> wrote: >> [snip] >> > Just to forestall the usual "just start them with arrays, eventually >> > they'll >> > be grateful" reply, I would want to hear that suggestion only from >> > someone >> > who has used it successfully with undergraduates in the social sciences. >> >> I teach psychologists and neuroscientists mainly - you can get an idea >> of the level I'm teaching at from the notebook I posted earlier in the >> thread. >> >> I can't speak to my success in any objective way, but I didn't hear >> the students complain about the X.dot(Y). This may be because >> >> a) only some of them have much experience of or liking for matlab >> b) some of them have the impression that Python is the way to go, and >> they accept that this will mean some changes >> c) not much of the code they see is of the form: X * (X.T * X).I * X.T >> . In fact, the notebook I posted was the closest to that stuff. In >> any case I personally found it easier show the ideas using sympy. > > > In support of Alan's view: > > Linear models in econometrics is all linear algebra, and GAUSS is still > popular among econometricians because you can write a lot of code just like > in the paper. (although GAUSS isn't as popular as it was some time ago, but > matlab is not much different.) > > https://github.com/statsmodels/statsmodels/blob/master/statsmodels/sandbox/regression/gmm.py#L1194
Maybe it would be helpful to draw the distinction between 1) Teaching people to do numerical coding 2) Using code to demonstrate mathematical concepts For 1) - it looks like people writing serious code don't generally use np.matrix - but maybe we're missing some code-bases. For 2) - I personally think sympy is better for this. There might be some middle-ground (1.5) where the idea is to get people comfortable with writing 10-50 line scripts to do linear algebra-type things. I guess these people will be particularly difficult to persuade that it's a good idea to switch computer languages. Cheers, Matthew _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion