David Warde-Farley

First, thanks for the wonderful package. I am often writing lots of scripts/commands that do slightly different things, but with some shared logic at the end. I implement this by...

Make the Sequence brick implement the Sequence ADT.

8

This makes it a lot easier to do surgery on Sequence bricks. Say, for example, you have some code that generates a sequence and you want to customize it by...

Make .allocate() and .initialize() return self

1

Particularly `initialize()`. This slight abuse of command-query separation would be pretty handy and I think we do it elsewhere in Blocks, though I can't really remember where.

Allow lists/tuples of tensors to get tagged as application inputs

2

Related to #1139 (which is my workaround to this issue for the time being), I'm in a situation where I have multiple, paired sets of inputs to an application but...

before_first_epoch callback never fires

5

Rather, it fires, but is incorrectly identified as `before_epoch`.

move get_* from filter.py to blocks.utils

1

I sometimes forget where the heck these things are when I need them. They really aren't specific to the VariableFilter in their use. https://github.com/mila-udem/blocks/blob/master/blocks/filter.py#L8-L37

Rethink pinned versions in requirements.txt

3

I'd say we should pin versions for Travis but only demand minimums for most things in the main `requirements.txt`, if we're recommending that's how people install. In many cases, the...

Shareable pre-trained models

12

Other frameworks, notably Caffe and Torch, support loading in serialized models that other people have trained, which facilitates wider sharing and reuse of results. That Blocks doesn't really have any...

Flatten namespaces

2

I propose that we make the public API available no more than 2 layers deep. I spend a lot of time trying to remember whether things are in `blocks.bricks` or...

Warn if SimpleExtension created without any conditions

1

I think it'd be beneficial to raise a warning if there are no conditions set in the constructor of `SimpleExtension`, with perhaps a flag to explicitly silence it. It's not...