Re: How to make GNU Guile more successful

[Jan Wedekind]

On Sat, 15 Jul 2017, Nala Ginrut wrote:

> @Jan Yes, that should be a way to go. And I have a new idea which is
> just an idea at present. Many we could find a way to read PyObject to
> Gulie, and call Python module directly (say, numpy). There should be a
> type-compatible abstract level between Guile and PyObject. If it
> works, we may implement Python3 on Guile. Although it seems a large
> work to implement complete Python3 frontend, we may save lot of work
> to write alternative Python modules for Guile.
> Julia language does in this idea, but it's backend is compatible with
> Python. My idea is not to convert all Python types to Guile, just wrap
> some types to a special object like <pyobject> is enough, then Guile

Sure, a Guile Python bridge would be nice for using NumPy and SciPy. 
However while NumPy is quite mature, it cannot do compose array 
operations and avoid intermediate results as Theano can.
One could write bindings to Theano. However I think that the bridging code 
would get in the way at some point.

> From the Theano documentation [1]:

> > > import numpy
> > > import theano.tensor as T
> > > from theano import function
> > > x = T.dscalar('x')
> > > y = T.dscalar('y')
> > > f = function([x, y], x + y)
> > > f(2, 3)

This is about having "2 + 3" being computed with fast compiled code.
With Scheme macros most of that can be implemented transparently [2]:

> > > (use-modules (aiscm tensor) (aiscm int))
> > > (tensor (+ 2 3))

[1] 
http://www.deeplearning.net/software/theano/tutorial/adding.html#adding-two-matrices
[2] http://wedesoft.github.io/aiscm/operation.html#tensor-operations