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Giving up on Julia

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Re: Giving up on Julia

#101

Post by whyever »

xixi77 wrote: post #58

Libraries? Sure. Ease of development, I cannot comment on. But measuring performance with timing a "hello world" program? Seriously? What scenario does the author have in mind that makes this particular benchmark even remotely relevant? The rest of the rant pretty much comes down to "it doesn't look like Python" (which is IMO a good thing, and I would certainly not call Python a "de facto standard of numerical comput…

> But measuring performance with timing a "hello world" program? Seriously? What scenario does the author have in mind that makes this particular benchmark even remotely relevant?

If Julia is to replace Python in scientific computing, people will want to use it for short plotting scripts. Startup time matters there. That hello world is so slow is already telling. A plotting script needs tens of seconds just to load the Julia libraries.

Re: Giving up on Julia

#102

Post by jjnoakes »

dom96 wrote: post #93
jjnoakes wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? :)

I don't think so. I think by virtue of having a GC language you pretty much have to manually anchor pointers before calling code which knows nothing of the GC.

But if anyone knows of counter examples, I would be interested in them as well.

Re: Giving up on Julia

#103

Post by [deleted] »

c3534l wrote: post #100
johnsea wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sideline…

[deleted]

Re: Giving up on Julia

#105

Post by nickpsecurity »

dom96 wrote: post #93
jjnoakes wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? :)

The example for Go looks pretty straight-forward:

https://golang.org/cmd/cgo/

Not an expert on these things by far but I remembered painless use of C in that language and it's GC'd. Thoughts?

Re: Giving up on Julia

#106

Post by banku_brougham »

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 ;-))

R is ranked lower year-on-year, but if you click into the actual rating time series you can see that R is on a tear into new highs of popularity. For that matter so is MATLAB. Julia is still buried in the next 50 list.

BTW i'm a julia proponent, I'm just starting into it but I like a lot about it.

Re: Giving up on Julia

#107

Post by eternalban »

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 ;-))

So is Lua.

Re: Giving up on Julia

#108

Post by banku_brougham »

jandrese wrote: post #50
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?

No less than Dykstra has weighed in on the numbering of arrays. http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF Having worked with both, I'm inclined to prefer 0 based addressing in most cases. It's slightly less intuitive, but it generally leads to cleaner code.

no less than dykstra was convicted of grand theft auto. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenny_Dykstra

I think you mean Dijkstra, who did say that, because of an argument with mathematicians about indexing from 1.

Re: Giving up on Julia

#109

Post by Fomite »

jules wrote: post #98
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…

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.

One thing to keep in mind is that scientific computing languages often have people using them who are not programmers, and who will not be "rolling their own multidimensional arrays."

If they're used to R, MATLAB, or basically any statistics programming/scripting language ever, not only will they be expecting 1-based indexing, they might not even know that that's a thing they have to think about.

Re: Giving up on Julia

#110

Post by KenoFischer »

SolarNet wrote: post #92
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.

> I think part of this problem is the community, multiple people have reported having bad interactions with core language devs.

I can only think of a couple of instance where I've heard anything like this.

The first and most prominent is Dan Luu. I'm very sad about losing him from the community. I've met him a couple of times in person, I still read his blog and I very much respect him. I don't think any of us have the full story of what happened there, but I sincerely hope that time may be able to smooth things over.

The second was in an HN comment that I just went back to find, and discovered that is was you. I'm sorry if you had a bad experience with the community. I know my perspective is biased, but I've rarely interacted with a community that's as passionate, helpful and friendly as the julia community (LLVM is up there as well).

As for documenting the process, I agree there could be some improvement there. We do have a contributors guide (CONTRIBUTING.md in the main repository). As for policies for feature inclusion, we've considered having more formal code owners for parts of the code base (right now there's mostly de facto code owners for various parts), but haven't found it necessary so far. I definitely expect some of this to be discussed at JuliaCon in June.

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