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Giving up on Julia

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Re: Giving up on Julia

#171

Post by davidacoder »

SolarNet wrote: post #164
chrispeel wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never had a bad interaction with the core language devs. OTOH, they are passionate about the language; I've found all the core developers I've met very helpful.

I'm referring to one specific core dev. However they all know each other from MIT so it makes it difficult for them to deal with that fact. I can point to 3 public examples, in addition to a couple of private reports about problems which allow me to be certain. But admittedly it's all second hand to me (from people who work close to the language).

I've been using julia for a little more than two years now. I've been subscribed to all the mailing lists and regularly read the github issues. Not all of them, but a fair share. I've never, ever seen any behavior by any of the core devs that one could even remotely describe as toxic, rude or anything like that. The community is actually really helpful and supportive.

I have seen this point about a toxic dev been made before in some blog post. Back then I followed the story up because it seemed so at odds with my experience with the core devs. It took a bit of googling and following links, but in the end, in my mind, there was simply nothing to the whole story. The supposedly rude behavior was not at all rude, imho.

I don't really know where these allegations come from, but I find this kind of "I've heard second hand that there is a toxic dev" inappropriate. If someone has a problem with someone, make it explicit, post the email that you dislike, so that others can judge themselves. But these vague accusations are not helpful, and at least from my point of view entirely at odds with how I have perceived the behavior of the core devs over the last two years.

I should say that I'm not part of the MIT crowd. I've never met or talked with any of the core devs and don't know them beyond reading their emails on mailing lists and sporadic interactions on github.

Re: Giving up on Julia

#172

Post by KenoFischer »

SolarNet wrote: post #156
KenoFischer wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I remember plenty of cases I got simply from observing the Julia repo for a few months, I could list them if you like... But I've been told by Julia contributors before that discussing this on HN is not an appropriate place. So we can discuss it, where I start linking to public examples on HN, or you can ignore my opinion and we can not discuss it. I do think HN is not the right forum to link to individual comments…

> I do think HN is not the right forum to link to individual comments and call out people for their behavior. Fair enough, my problem is that the project continually looses what appear to be serious contributors to a toxic developer (admittedly all second hand to me; but there are public examples and some private reports I have; including the person who first showed me Julia years ago). For all that it is an interest…

> Which just sort of makes me bitter you fail to acknowledge the problems.

I'm perfectly happy to acknowledge that there have been conflicts in the community. However, I maintain that the overwhelming majority of interactions in the community are immensely positive. Please do also consider that there may be parts of the story that you are not seeing in the public issues. I do hope you will consider giving the community a second chance. You have quite clearly identified some of the major technical challenges we face and we'd love to hear any ideas you have to address them.

Re: Giving up on Julia

#173

Post by pjmlp »

eggy wrote: post #144
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?

Fortran was meant to be a high-level language at the time, so chose 1-based indexing. When C and lower-level languages came on the scene they reverted it back to zero-based, since this is more appropriate at the lower hardware level. CBLAS is zero-based. Intel's Math Kernel Library, which is a performant math library hand-tuned for Intel processors is zero-based in MKL-CBLAS. It all depends on what you are familiar w…

It is all a matter of what the compiler does, array accesses should generate the same Assembly instructions.

I have used quite a few languages whose base index could be 0, 1 or whatever I choosed. Even enumerations.

Re: Giving up on Julia

#174

Post by kazinator »

lokedhs wrote: post #151
dragonwriter wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distance doesn't use indexing at all, because measures are not indexes, so it doesn't make sense to say "if distances used 1-based indexing". OTOH, for something physical that actually is indexing, or at least closely analogous to it, we could ask "what if principal quantum numbers used 1-based indexing". But, then, the answer would be "things would look exactly like they do now, because it already does."

But that's the point, once you think of indexes as distance things make much more sense. The index is the distance from the first element. Thus, the third element is two elements away from the first, thus it has index 2. I think the only reason zero-based indexing is not the standard everywhere is because some people (usually non-programmers) have a problem with the idea that the fifth element has index four. I am su…

Consequently, when those people do music, they have to accept that something called an octave has seven notes, and inverting an interval is based on the "rule of nine", thanks to the way they defined intervals as one based.

Re: Giving up on Julia

#175

Post by jimktrains2 »

gh02t wrote: post #159
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?

Fortran has the rather unusual feature that you can change the indexing to an arbitrary offset. You can declare arrays to be indexed from 0 if you want, but it defaults to 1 and almost nobody uses this feature for obvious reasons.

BASIC did as well IIRC.

Re: Giving up on Julia

#177

Post by nl »

tcpekin wrote: post #161
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…

I don't really get the difference. I'm in academia i guess (grad school) and use MATLAB a bunch, as well as Python (not a CS major). I don't think it's that much work to switch between the two, and I don't understand why there's such a division. Why is this such a huge deal?

It's not. It's nothing more than bike-shedding language design.

It's an easy thing to discuss, and everyone is an expert. Meanwhile, the real problems get ignored.

Re: Giving up on Julia

#178

Post by e12e »

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.

That argument never felt very convincing to me. Perhaps because it really is about aesthetics, not some deep philosophical ideas connected to numbers.

I see it as rather simple. If you're listing off-sets, starting at 0 makes sense, because there'll be something there. But if you're counting elements starting at 1 makes more sense. I don't have 9 fingers offset from my first one, which I call finger zero; I have ten fingers, starting with the first one.

A set with no members is the zero set, once you add one element, you have a set of one. An empty list contains no elements. It does not have a first member, because it's empty. Add an element, and it will have one member, and it will be in the first position. Not in the zeroeth offset from the beginning.

You can the numeric names of letters of a string in an array, but I don't see that as a compelling reason for naming the first letter of a word, the letter which is at the zero-eth offset from where the word is held in memory. At best, it's a low level optimization, at worst it's just a leaky abstraction. Maybe you want to store the length of the word there (like in Pascal), for a different trade-off in terms of what is optimized.

Re: Giving up on Julia

#179

Post by gh02t »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #175
gh02t wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortran has the rather unusual feature that you can change the indexing to an arbitrary offset. You can declare arrays to be indexed from 0 if you want, but it defaults to 1 and almost nobody uses this feature for obvious reasons.

BASIC did as well IIRC.

Pascal as well I think. I dunno which was the first to support it, but it's not exactly a popular thing in modern programming.
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