What’s a better syntax then?

why_not_both.gif

I've read the article and it didn't seem to me the author is suggesting loops

The point here is not that it’s loops per se, the point is that the indexing is explicit. It seems like a big win to me. The article’s ~10 non-trivial examples all make the code easier to read, and more importantly, to understand exactly what the code is doing. It is true that some operations are difficult to reason about, that’s where explicit indexing really helps. The article resonates with me because I do want to learn numpy syntax, I’ve written hundreds of programs with nympy, spent countless hours doing battle with it, and I feel like I’m no better off now than someone who’s brand new to it. The indexing is constantly confounding, nothing ever just works. Anytime you see “None” and “axis=“ inside an operation, it’s a tell: bound to be difficult to comprehend. I’m always having to guess how to use some combination of reshape, dstack, hstack, transpose, and five other shape changers I’m forgetting, just to get something to work and it’s difficult to read and understand later. It feels like there is no debugging, only rewriting. I keep reading the manual for einsum over again and I’ve used it, but I can’t explain how, why, or when to use it, it seems like this thing you have to resort to because no other indexing seems to work. The ability to do straightforward explicit non-clever indexing as if you were writing loops seems like a pretty big step forward.

but only https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44063490 has 'some' comments. so this current discussion is better

Need transpilation rather than relying on this library being present. I like the idea alot though

(author here) This wraps JAX and JAX's version of NumPy. It would surely require some development to keep up, although it's quite short and simple (only 700 lines), so I don't think it would be a big burden. That said, I should be clear that my goal here is just to show that this is possible/easy, and possibly inspire existing array packages to consider adding this kind of syntax.

I like your alternatives! I agree that having to write

  X = dp.Slot()

before assigning to X is unfortunate. I settled on the current syntax mostly just because I thought it was the choice that made it most "obvious" what was happening under the hood. If you really want to, you could use the walrus operator and write

  (X := dp.Slot())['i','j'] = ...

but this cure seems worse than the disease...

Actually, doing something like

  X = new['i','j'] = ...

could simplify the implementation. Currently, a Slot has to act both like an Array and a Slot, which is slightly awkward. If new is a special object, it could just return an Array, which would be a bit nicer.