Video of SciPy 2011 talk

The video from my SciPy 2011 talk is available here.

At the end of the talk, Andy Terrell asked a question about why this structured approach is necessary - why not just program the steps directly in a script?

I agree that the system I presented does seem very 'heavyweight'. But it feels that doing the transformations directly loses some meta-information that would be useful to keep around, such as which transformations were applied at each step. Additionally, by storing the the pieces of the derivation in data structures, they are potentially easier to manipulate (and emphasizes that they can and should be programmatically manipulated). However, Python's meta-tools are quite powerful, and could probably used to manipulate derivations written directly in a script.


Switching to a different issue, the presented example effectively inlines all the functions into the integral. This is clearly not scalable in the face of larger and more complex expressions. The system needs some way to represent pieces that should transform into a function call in the generated code. I have something working now, but it needs some clean-up work.