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Nvidia Warp: A Python framework for high performance GPU simulation and graphics

(github.com)
490 points jarmitage | 1 comments | 14 Jun 24 13:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.377s | source
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paulluuk ◴[14 Jun 24 14:55 UTC] No.40681492[source]▶
While this is really cool, I have to say..

> import warp as wp

Can we please not copy this convention over from numpy? In the example script, you use 17 characters to write this just to save 18 characters later on in the script. Just import the warp commands you use, or if you really want "import warp", but don't rename imported libraries, please.

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dahfizz ◴[14 Jun 24 14:58 UTC] No.40681523[source]▶
Strongly agreed! This convention has even infected internal tooling at my company. Scripts end up with tons of cryptic three letter names. It saves a couple keystrokes but wastes engineering time to maintain
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physicsguy ◴[14 Jun 24 15:21 UTC] No.40681717[source]▶
The convention is a convention because the libraries are used so commonly. If you give anyone in scientific computing Python world something with “np” or “pd” then they know what that is. Doing something other than what is convention for those libraries wastes more time when people jump into a file because people have to work out now whether “array” is some bespoke type or the NumPy one they’re used to.
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1. paulluuk ◴[14 Jun 24 16:02 UTC] No.40682003[source]▶
There is no way that "warp" is already such a household name that it's common enough to shorten it to "wp". Likewise, the libraries at OP's company are for sure not going to be common to anyone starting out at the company, and might still be confusing to anyone who has worked there for years but just hasn't had to use that specific library.

Pandas and Numpy are popular, sure. As is Tensorflow (often shortened to tf). But where do you draw the line, then? should the openai library be imported as oa? should flask be imported as fk? should requests be imported as rq?

It seems to happen mostly to libraries that are commonly used by one specific audience: scientists who are forced to use a programming language, and who think that 1-letter variables are good variable names, and who prefer using notebooks over scripts with functions.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that Python gets so much attention from the scientific community, but I feel that small little annoyances like this creep in because of it, too.