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Giving up on Julia

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Re: Giving up on Julia

#231

Post by ced »

ScottPJones wrote: post #223
johnsea wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then - as a bystander - let me mention that I once wondered about your insistent replies in some gh issue. God, can't he stop, I thought, and, wow, they have patience. Fortunately such a situation is rare and I'm very often impressed by the intelligent friendly conversations I see. A lot to learn.

Yes, a year ago I'd never worked on any open source project, didn't use GitHub, Google Groups, Twitter, StackOverflow, or any of the other programmer social media sites, and was a total newbie about Julia, using git, and dealing with an open source community. Since I had convinced the other people at the startup where I am working that using Julia would be better for us than a mashup of Python, C, C++14, R or Octave,…

You know, I read some of the harsh comments you got from people, and they may have been right to say these things, I don't know. But kudos for taking it in stride and maintaining a positive attitude. Good luck in your projects.

Re: Giving up on Julia

#232

Post by ScottPJones »

ced wrote: post #231
ScottPJones wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, a year ago I'd never worked on any open source project, didn't use GitHub, Google Groups, Twitter, StackOverflow, or any of the other programmer social media sites, and was a total newbie about Julia, using git, and dealing with an open source community. Since I had convinced the other people at the startup where I am working that using Julia would be better for us than a mashup of Python, C, C++14, R or Octave,…

You know, I read some of the harsh comments you got from people, and they may have been right to say these things, I don't know. But kudos for taking it in stride and maintaining a positive attitude. Good luck in your projects.

Thanks. I've never had any problems with constructive criticism, no matter how harsh it might seem (often that is where you learn the most). The problem is when people make disrespectful, disparaging, insulting remarks (which is against both the NumFocus & Julia community standards), and nothing is done about it, which has ended up driving away several people already. Hopefully that can be addressed.

Re: Giving up on Julia

#233

Post by [deleted] »

dnautics wrote: post #182
bluecalm wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very error prone if you implemented algorithms using 0 based indexing your whole programming life. You are just bound to make mistakes if suddenly it's 1 based indexing. I am not saying 0 based indexing is technically superior (I really have no opinion on that). I could compare it to switching positions of brake and accelerator in a car - you can talk about brake on the right design being superior all you want b…

0-based indexing is technically superior, because it makes offsets for memory addressing simpler.

[deleted]

Re: Giving up on Julia

#234

Post by davidacoder »

ScottPJones wrote: post #208
davidacoder wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mad…

The rude behavior definitely exists, I can point out a number of examples if you send me your e-mail address (you can look me up, @ScottPJones on GitHub, easily enough). I've seen that that sort of disrespectful behavior tends to spread in the community, unfortunately, when nobody dares call out one person for their comments and actions, because of their position.

I followed your interactions with the core devs, at least the public ones. I think the core devs handled the situation with an enormous amount of patience and tact.

Re: Giving up on Julia

#235

Post by johnsea »

ScottPJones wrote: post #223
johnsea wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then - as a bystander - let me mention that I once wondered about your insistent replies in some gh issue. God, can't he stop, I thought, and, wow, they have patience. Fortunately such a situation is rare and I'm very often impressed by the intelligent friendly conversations I see. A lot to learn.

Yes, a year ago I'd never worked on any open source project, didn't use GitHub, Google Groups, Twitter, StackOverflow, or any of the other programmer social media sites, and was a total newbie about Julia, using git, and dealing with an open source community. Since I had convinced the other people at the startup where I am working that using Julia would be better for us than a mashup of Python, C, C++14, R or Octave,…

Thank you for this reply, I also wish you luck with your project, joy at the JuliaCon and I'm glad that 0.4 worked :-)

Maybe a source of discontent is that startups are using Julia 'for real' and are under pressure to deliver. On the other side Julia is still developing. Core devs work feverishly but some issues just need 'time to brew'. Quiet thinking/coding alone or in small circles.

IIRC on a video of Alan Edelman he ~ said that he was involved in HPC for 30 years and to this day they weren't that successful and don't know how to do it. Julia is trying to do it in a completely different way. - Considering 30 years, does it matter if Julia takes 'her' time to be crowned?

Re: Giving up on Julia

#236

Post by happimess »

lorenzhs wrote: post #188
kazinator wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you mean it's displacing not indexing? Counting is indexing! What is it that you do when you count items in a set? You put them into correspondence with the natural numbers, indicating each one as 1, 2, 3, ... The last integer is the count. Yes, it is related to the "is the first floor ground, or the one above it"; and it's clear that some programming languages take their cue from stairs and elevators. Nobody…

Since we can probably agree that you're not indexing distances or other units of measurement (you can make a piece of string of length sprt(2) centimeters or other irrational lengths!), let's skip the terminology argument. That wasn't my point. Is skipping the 13th floor a US thing? I don't recall ever seeing it in the UK or Germany.

Yes, in the US, you will almost never see a 13th floor.

Re: Giving up on Julia

#237

Post by marmaduke »

ska wrote: post #24
marmaduke wrote: post #8

Numba package for Python gives you the LLVM JIT for numerical work. I really don't see how Julia is relevant anymore.

Python really doesn't (and cannot) address many of the design goals of Julia. At least as I understand them (and I'm not a Julia user). Whether or not Julia has/will achieve them either is a separate issue. Python can be a very useful mess for this sort of work (numerical analysis etc.), and is succeeding at that quite well. In fact, that's it's main challenge to something like Julia. Not design, that ship sailed a l…

Python is a mess if you make it that way.

What are these design principles in Julia that Python can't possibly uphold?

Re: Giving up on Julia

#238

Post by marmaduke »

cschmidt wrote: post #129
marmaduke wrote: post #8

Numba package for Python gives you the LLVM JIT for numerical work. I really don't see how Julia is relevant anymore.

In my (somewhat limited) experience, Numba works great until it doesn't. Loops on numpy arrays work great. Other stuff becomes super slow, without any real way to understand what is happening. Julia sees more understandable.

Lol, "works great until it doesn't" applies to any abstraction, including your L3 cache.

What's specifically better about Julia here?

Re: Giving up on Julia

#239

Post by cschmidt »

marmaduke wrote: post #238
cschmidt wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my (somewhat limited) experience, Numba works great until it doesn't. Loops on numpy arrays work great. Other stuff becomes super slow, without any real way to understand what is happening. Julia sees more understandable.

Lol, "works great until it doesn't" applies to any abstraction, including your L3 cache. What's specifically better about Julia here?

Numba seems to fall back to regular slow python code when it can't handle things, without any warning. I couldn't find a way to tell if a routine was compiling to fast code, or dropping back to slow code. (As I say, I didn't use it that much, so it might exist.)

With Julia is it more well defined when your code is fast. Write type stable code, according to these guidelines...

http://docs.julialang.org/en/release-0.4/manual/performance-...

and you code will be going fast. Specifically, @code_warntype tells you when your code is going to be slow.

Re: Giving up on Julia

#240

Post by pkm »

SolarNet wrote: post #90
papaf wrote: post #72

I know R and have used Octave. I started learning Julia this morning after a physicist recommended it to me after he switched from python. I used Jupyter/Julia to simulate a neuron as a practice exercise. This is my experience as a beginner: 1. The static typing makes a big and positive difference. Its nice having a statically typed repl. 2. The documentation is good. 3. Using unicode symbols and \mu style tab comple…

> The base install is a bit bare. I think the problem here is the library approach. They should break stuff out of Julia's core library and move them into default included libraries (like python does).

Yes they should, and that is exactly what is happening in Base, and has been happening for a while. A project like Julia doesn't have too much dev time input, so you cannot expect this to happen over night.
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