[racket] Blog post about Racket

On 05/13/2014 10:26 AM, Jay Kominek wrote:
> On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 9:35 AM, Konrad Hinsen
>
>> I see Racket's strength for scientific computing in a very different
>> aspect: the possibility to define languages tailor-made for expressing
>> computational models in some application domain. Scientists generally
>> don't want to "write programs", and when they do, the results are
>> often not pretty. I'd like to have scientists do science and
>> programmers write programs. Racket could become the meeting point for
>> the two professions.
>
> I've personally watched a number of projects where that could've saved
> significant time, money and frustration. I'm not optimistic about it
> coming to pass, but it'd sure be nice.

My dissertation is on programming languages for Bayesian analysis, which 
can handle arbitrary, possibly recursively defined models and arbitrary 
probabilistic conditions.

The Racket implementation, Dr. Bayes, is efficient (in that it's 
polynomial-time) and extremely flexible, but not fast enough for 
real-world-sized problems. It's also just a core calculus right now, so 
it's not easy to use. For my postdoctoral research, which I expect to 
start in June, I'll address those issues. I should have a usable package 
later this year.

My broader research agenda is to do exactly what Konrad is hoping for.

Neil ⊥