Frequently Asked Questions

This page answers some of the often asked questions about harold.

Is it really free?

Yes. Please search “MIT Expat” license or see a summary in TL;DR Legal.

How fast is it?

Currently in its unoptimized state, it is pretty close to matlab speed, due to being lighter and simpler. However, this will change when the structural correctness is established. Note that, control engineering computations rarely require speed. And when they do, they have to be really, really fast, much faster than what these software offer. Hence, I have left the optimization of the code until the Numba, Cython etc. debate settles. Plus, it is much simpler to do parallelized tasks in Python. So more speed-ups are around the corner waiting for me to read more documentation.

The algorithmic speed is usually head-to-head with other software, since I also used the new published methods as much as I can understand them.

Why is deciBell not the default unit?

Because it does not serve to the general audience. And as a unit, it is just a gain away from the logarithmic plot. So there is no added value. But for the sake of completeness, there are some keyword options available to select it.

Why is there no Python 2 support?

Python 2 is legacy code. Get over it.

Why is it called harold?

Originally, it was planned to be called as pykant which is a wordplay between the Dutch words “spicy” and “Py(thon) side”. But it also has a pretty strong slang side to it too in english. So that didn’t fly.

Then, after accidentally reading the wildly off-target manuscript of David A. Mindell [1], I was saddened by witnessing yet another instance of the math snobbery that has poisoned the control engineering field in the last decades; I wanted something that resembles the good ol’ days of automation.

In this specific manuscript Mindell attempts to, in a quite skilful tongue-in-cheek fashion, belittle the invention of negative feedback amplifier by Black to a mere coincidence involving a layman that is S.H. Black. Because Black was too generous about the scale of his achievements, he cannot be the actual inventor because then the classical über-humble genius storyline that needs to follow would not follow. Mindell, later finds his heroes; it should have been the smart PhD floor of Bell Labs that created all the smaller mountains (which is indeed true for other things). Quoting from his introduction, “As it turns out, Black did not understand as much about feedback as he later recalled.”, Mindell later demonstrates clearly that himself too, does not understand feedback theory that much and fails to identify his anachronistic focus and hindsight bias. Consequently, he misinterprets these milestones and thus chooses the easiest way out by polishing the elitist trophies and dismisses a truly gigantic discovery based on its inventor’s personality.

Hence, the name harold to pay some tribute to the real people as opposed to the pantheon of stainless characters.

Footnotes

[1]D.A. Mindell, “Opening Black’s Box: Rethinking Feedback’s Myth of Origin”, Technology and Culture, Volume 41, Number 3, pp. 405-434, July 2000. Accessed: 17 February 2015