m_c_g

Author of said MATLAB package (CVX) here. Yours is a really interesting observation!

When the book was created, CVX didn't exist. Instead, Boyd & Vandenberghe wrote separate MATLAB scripts for virtually every figure (to be fair, with a lot of cut-and-paste and convenience functions). The course did hum along pretty well without CVX (or its later and now better-supported Python equivalent CVXPY), for sure.

I think it is fair to say that these software packages made convex optimization far more accessible a topic. Certainly, implementing some of the solution techniques is not straightforward. But far more people can actually spend time using convex optimization in their application domains if they don't have to concern themselves with those implementation complexities.

Incidentally, on the commercial side, Mosek ApS and Gurobi both offer Python-based modeling frameworks for convex optimization that do a great job of making the discipline accessible as well. They don't operate in quite the same way as CVX and CVXPY, but that's not really important: what matters is that people can readily solve their problems, not the specific approach that gets that done.

Indeed! Converting one's entire code base to a different language ecosystem, finding equivalents to each of your third-party dependencies, is less painful than employing a library to selectively compile a few performance bottlenecks in your code.

(Modules like PyJulia facilitate a more incremental approach.)

I'm dying over here

My head is spinning. I am certain I heard about this weeks ago. I don't think it was through a backchannel or a rumor mill—I thought I had read something official about it. In fact, I've spoken to people several times about it, most recently yesterday. And when they expressed surprise, I went looking for the official announcement, and I couldn't find one.

Is it possible that RStudio Inc. made a soft announcement that they later pulled for re-tooling? Or perhaps my memory is faulty and I did just hear about it through a back channel. Obviously this is something that takes time to plan and execute so it has been in the works for awhile.