hydra VS edn

Nice tool, only unfortunate name, consider changing it. Already very well know security tool named hydra https://github.com/vanhauser-thc/thc-hydra been around since 2001. Then facebook went ahead and named their config tool hydra https://github.com/facebookresearch/hydra on top of it. Like we get it, hydra popular mythology but we could use more original naming for tools

This looks really impressive, and I'm excited to see how it performs on our data!

P.S., I think the name conflicts with Hydra, the configuration management library: https://hydra.cc/

I've been trying to learn PyTorch Lightning and Hydra in order to use/create my own custom deep learning template (e.g. like this) as it would greatly help with my research workflow. A lot of the work I do requires me to analyse metrics based on the logits/activations of the model.

However, hydra seems to have several limitations that are really annoying and are making me reconsider my choice. Most problematic is the inability to group parameters together in a multirun. Hydra only supports trying all combinations of parameters, as described in https://github.com/facebookresearch/hydra/issues/1258, which does not seem to be a priority for hydra. Furthermore, hydras optuna optimizer implementation does not allow for early pruning of bad runs, which while not a deal breaker is definitely a nice to have feature.

Do you hate the fact that they don't let you return the config file: https://github.com/facebookresearch/hydra/issues/407

I kind of built this due to frustrations with Hydra. Hydra is an end to end framework, it locks you into a certain DL project format, it decides logging, model saving and a whole host of things. For example Hydra can do the same config file overwriting that I allow but you have to store the config file with the name config.yaml inside a specific folder. On top of that hydra doesn’t let you return the config file from the main function so you have to put all the major logic in the main function itself (link), the authors claim this is by design. I can find Hydra useful for a mature less experimental project. But in my robotics and ML research, I like being able to write code where I want and integrating it how I want, especially when debugging for which I think this package is useful. TLDR; If you just want the config file functionality use my package, if you want a complete DL project manager use Hydra. While hydra implements this config file functionality, it also adds a lot of restrictions to project structure that you might not like.

For managing configs of ML experiments (where each experiment can override a base config, and "variant" configs can further override the experiment config, etc), Hydra + Yaml + OmegaConf is really nice.

https://hydra.cc/

I admit I don't fully understand all the advanced options in Hydra, but the basic usage is already very useful. A nice guide is here:

https://florianwilhelm.info/2022/01/configuration_via_yaml_a...

> was utterly surprised how no one ever apparently has thought to create a configuration/templating system that's basically a fancy library on top of Scheme.

There's Clojure's extensible data notation: https://github.com/edn-format/edn

A thin language layer around edn/datalog, the query language

EDN (Extensible Data Notation) is a subset of Clojure: https://github.com/edn-format/edn

It is:

- Streamable

- Extensible

- Whitespace-insensitive, but there are formatting conventions for readability

To begin with, EDN is somewhat like the JSON of Clojure. And regarding the code is data/data is code nature of Clojure, it is Clojure. It doesn't have some of the vagaries of JSON, and it is also extensible.

Alien is not a reason something is bad, just that's it's unusual. JSON was a bit alien when it first arrived as well, as everyone was used to XML at the time.

`{num 5, val 4}` looks fine to me, but we can do even better! We already know objects/maps are always in pairs, so we don't really need that comma either. Just do `{num 5 val 4}` and we save yet another unnecessary characters.

Of course, I didn't come up with this format myself, what I actually want JSON to be is EDN (https://github.com/edn-format/edn) which is a standalone format but also directly used in Clojure, so it already exists inside a programming language and works very well. There keys are strings though, so you example would end up being `{"num" 5 "val" 5 "person" var}`, where commas are optional.

I just checked out the spec, and it gets pretty ugly in the Table section. A lot of the json examples are both shorter and IMO more precise. Stuff that’s not allowed with [table] is allowed with [[table]], and it’s confusing to understand what level of depth I’m at.

I’ll take edn over any of “em. https://github.com/edn-format/edn

As XT is written in Clojure and it natively supports Clojure’s data types, we were not satisfied with available JSON types and decided to give EDN a try - that way we would have way more supported types:

Compare the nightmare that is pickling with how simple it is to serialize pure data with edn in clojure. What ends up happening is people passing around JSONs or whatever and writing parsing/encoding code at each end, which makes things unnecessarily more complex, and dangerous, and error prone, and boring, etc...