The Mole’s grandmother was born in another country, one where English is not the native language. \u00a0We will return to this point later. \u00a0Our immediate point of departure, however, is that the Mole is currently burnishing his credentials in pursuit of a return to more technical work and has, to that end, been taking online courses on machine learning and other “data science” topics. \u00a0The first course he took was quite theoretical, abstract, and mathematical, and the normal equation method of solving a linear regression problem was presented as<\/p>\n
(XT<\/sup>X)-1<\/sup>XT<\/sup>y<\/strong><\/p>\n using the universally familiar notation of linear algebra.<\/p>\n As the Mole completes homework assignments he has implemented this several times, in several languages, and expects to have to do it at least once more in at least one more language. \u00a0Each reimplementation requires a wholly uninstructive detour into syntax, a cost that the Mole would justify as an investment if he could settle with some confidence on one of these languages as the one he was likely to use primarily in the near future. \u00a0But the language wars rage on — it was always thus, and always will be — and the poor Mole cannot predict what will be most useful. \u00a0So far, the Mole has written<\/p>\n pinv(X’ * X) * X’ * y<\/span><\/p>\n in Octave and<\/p>\n coef(lm(y~X[,2]+X[,3]))<\/span><\/p>\n and<\/p>\n solve(t(X) %*% X) %*% t(X) %*% y<\/span><\/p>\n in R. \u00a0He fully expects to add Python to the list very shortly. \u00a0Then what? \u00a0Julia? \u00a0Java? \u00a0Javascript?<\/p>\n The Mole’s grandmother spoke excellent, nearly unaccented, English. \u00a0Yet traces of her native tongue remained: \u00a0when she counted silently to herself (while kntting, for example), she reverted to her first language. \u00a0So it is with the Mole, who leaves as an exercise for the reader determining why his mind first imagines this code:<\/p>\n ((\u2339((\u2349X)+.\u00d7X))+.\u00d7\u2349X)+.\u00d7Y<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Mole’s grandmother was born in another country, one where English is not the native language. \u00a0We will return to this point later. \u00a0Our immediate point of departure, however, is that the Mole is currently burnishing his credentials in pursuit of a return to more technical work and has, to that end, been taking online… Continue reading On a Whinge and a Parser<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mole-end","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onionsauce.com\/mole_end\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}