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Giving up on Julia

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Re: Giving up on Julia

#91

Post by kazinator »

kazinator wrote: post #79
vitaut wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the detailed response. I hope that my post wasn't too harsh, the intent was mostly to attract attention to the current issues not to undermine the great work that you and others have been doing. I'm glad that many of the issues that I mentioned are being addressed. Maybe I'll give Julia another go in some time =). The question of syntax is subjective of course. From the set {C-like, Python, MATLAB} I'd def…

If distances used 1 based indexing: metric distance conversion chart: cm m km 1 1.00 1.00000 2 1.01 1.00001 3 1.02 1.00002 ... 101 2.00 1.00100 ... 100000 1000.99 1.99999 The ratios between the values aren't fixed now; we can't go from cm to m just by scaling by 100. We must subtract, scale then add. One based indexing falls apart if you have to index a region of storage as bits, bytes and words at the same time.

It's ironic, though, that most languages report 1-based source code line numbers in their error diagnostics, regardless of how they handle indexing. So that does say something.

And their documentation has section numbers like 1.1, 1.2, ... 5.3.3.

Re: Giving up on Julia

#92

Post by SolarNet »

KenoFischer wrote: post #9

Happy to address these points: - Startup performance/memory usage Yes, we are definitely very acutely aware of these. Julia is not currently optimized for frequently run short scripts. That's the price on pays for having to bring up the entire runtime system (initializing the compiler, RNG, external libraries etc). The good news is that there will be a solution to this soon, which is to statically compile your julia…

> - Slowing down in development

I think part of this problem is the community, multiple people have reported having bad interactions with core language devs. Also the policies for inclusion of features, how to propose features, how decisions are made with respect to the code base, etc. all seem poorly documented.

Re: Giving up on Julia

#93

Post by dom96 »

jjnoakes wrote: post #86
dom96 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware of any language's whose FFI is that trivial?

Do I have to be aware of some other language with such a trivial FFI in order to question the claim that Nim has such a trivial FFI? (C++ has such a trivial FFI, as well as non-GC languages which compile to C code... there may be more as well)

Sorry, it wasn't my intention to imply that. I'm genuinely curious, I haven't used many language's FFI to know which is best.

You mention non-GC languages. Are there any GC languages that do? :)

Re: Giving up on Julia

#94

Post by MikeHolman »

dagw wrote: post #55
GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've gotten 400x speedups going from python to c++.

I've gotten 200x speedup going (badly written) Javascript to (better written) pure python, despite python being a nominally slower language according micro-benchmarks. Comparing run time without knowing anything about the code doesn't say much.

Were you using a js runtime without a JIT? Were your python algorithms better? Otherwise a 200x speedup sounds completely unbelievable. That would basically indicate a bug in the js runtime causing degenerate performance under your scenario.

Re: Giving up on Julia

#95

Post by dnautics »

bluecalm wrote: post #75
KenoFischer wrote: post #9

Happy to address these points: - Startup performance/memory usage Yes, we are definitely very acutely aware of these. Julia is not currently optimized for frequently run short scripts. That's the price on pays for having to bring up the entire runtime system (initializing the compiler, RNG, external libraries etc). The good news is that there will be a solution to this soon, which is to statically compile your julia…

The thing about 1 based indexing is that it's a kind of in your face "this is different" decision from the point of view of a programmers of most popular languages. To be honest I wouldn't want to start investing my time into a language where people who proposed 1 based indexing are making design decisions. It's not that I think they are incompetent but it's clear they care way more about some different world than ab…

You shouldn't be so biased. Having one based indexing makes translating numerical recipes from pure math textbooks (where vectors and matrices are generally one-based) simpler and less error prone. I say this as someone who chafes at Julia's one based indexing as a matter of professional practice.

Re: Giving up on Julia

#96

Post by tavert »

kazinator wrote: post #81
bmh100 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One-based indexing is also used in Fortran, which seems to be used in a great deal of numerical computing even today. Additionally, BLAS/LAPACK is an important linear algebra library written in Fortan. I am somewhat confused by your discussion of startup times. Since Julia is a "programming language for technical computing", what scenario are you imagining where startup times would be a significant concern?

BLAS is an API, more or less. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Linear_Algebra_Subprogra...

And the Fortran-convention BLAS API is quite a bit more widely used than the CBLAS API. idamax in the Fortran API, and pivot vectors in LAPACK factorizations, return 1-based indices.

Re: Giving up on Julia

#97

Post by [deleted] »

bluecalm wrote: post #75
KenoFischer wrote: post #9

Happy to address these points: - Startup performance/memory usage Yes, we are definitely very acutely aware of these. Julia is not currently optimized for frequently run short scripts. That's the price on pays for having to bring up the entire runtime system (initializing the compiler, RNG, external libraries etc). The good news is that there will be a solution to this soon, which is to statically compile your julia…

The thing about 1 based indexing is that it's a kind of in your face "this is different" decision from the point of view of a programmers of most popular languages. To be honest I wouldn't want to start investing my time into a language where people who proposed 1 based indexing are making design decisions. It's not that I think they are incompetent but it's clear they care way more about some different world than ab…

[deleted]

Re: Giving up on Julia

#98

Post by jules »

bluecalm wrote: post #75
KenoFischer wrote: post #9

Happy to address these points: - Startup performance/memory usage Yes, we are definitely very acutely aware of these. Julia is not currently optimized for frequently run short scripts. That's the price on pays for having to bring up the entire runtime system (initializing the compiler, RNG, external libraries etc). The good news is that there will be a solution to this soon, which is to statically compile your julia…

The thing about 1 based indexing is that it's a kind of in your face "this is different" decision from the point of view of a programmers of most popular languages. To be honest I wouldn't want to start investing my time into a language where people who proposed 1 based indexing are making design decisions. It's not that I think they are incompetent but it's clear they care way more about some different world than ab…

Does 1 based indexing actually matter? It does if you are doing index arithmetic for rolling your own multidimensional arrays for example, but one shouldn't do those kind of things anyway.

Re: Giving up on Julia

#99

Post by tmalsburg2 »

Not sure why this is on the front page because the criticism in this article is fairly superficial. Julia was designed for scientific computing and interpreter start-up time doesn't matter at all in this context, especifically the start-up time of hello-world. Baseline memory consumption isn't an issue either and one-based indexing is simply something to get used to. If this stops you from being productive, it's not the language's fault. The comments about the syntax remind me of all those people saying Lisp is a bad language because it has too many parentheses.

Re: Giving up on Julia

#100

Post by c3534l »

johnsea wrote: post #85
bluecalm wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about 1 based indexing is that it's a kind of in your face "this is different" decision from the point of view of a programmers of most popular languages. To be honest I wouldn't want to start investing my time into a language where people who proposed 1 based indexing are making design decisions. It's not that I think they are incompetent but it's clear they care way more about some different world than ab…

R and Mathematica are also 1 based. And R really is popular ( http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index?page=index - ok, popularity is droping right now, likely b/c of Julia ;-))

Julia seems like it's meant to be friendly to people who know MATLAB, Python, and R (even Fortran). R and Python are really comfortable with working with data science and that's what Julia is geared toward. I have no experience with MATLAB, though. Julia's programming "world" may indeed be a different programming world than C programmers.

I'm not defending Julia per se. I've been patiently observing from the sidelines to see how the language shapes up.

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