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Computer scientist Viral Shah helped build Julia from Bengaluru, India

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Re: Computer scientist Viral Shah helped build Julia from Bengaluru, India

#12
post #4

Why can't people just settle on Python? Julia is going to die anyways in the near future.

The same reasons people migrated to Python in the late 90s from matlab, Fortran and C++: Python addressed pain points in those languages and ecosystems. Julia addresses deficiencies in Python the language. Unfortunately, it lacks the ecosystem: until it gets the rich library set that Python has, we're stuck with Python since ecosystem is arguably more important for practical traction than the base language.

Re: Computer scientist Viral Shah helped build Julia from Bengaluru, India

#13
post #6

Why every Indian programmer has a burdon to prove that he/she is not an IT coolie ? How's is that less racist than some redneck assuming all black people are thugs ?

I am from Hyderabad, India and felt racist reading that title - "IT coolies". I believe the author just want to make headline. A lot of innovation happens that gets unnoticed in Silicon Valley or around the world. People here do not have access to mentorship & peer network so easily (openly available in California), still being self-motivated and connected by reading tech blogs, advises, etc. Just top of my head are…

"I am from Hyderabad, India and felt racist reading that title - "IT coolies"."

That's why I edit the titles, totally missed the point of innovation from a foreign hacker widely used in SV and around the world. Point proven.

Re: Computer scientist Viral Shah helped build Julia from Bengaluru, India

#17
As an Indian working in India, the 'in Bengaluru' part actually makes me a bit sad. While Shah may have physically been in India when he was working on Julia, the project might not have happened without his having gone to the US for graduate studies. I can't think of any comparable project started entirely by people working in India.

The reason is not lack of ability: my guess is that at any time India's best institutions like the IITs or IISc have at least a hundred people who could build something like Julia. Instead it is perhaps India's poverty that prevents people from starting something that does not have an immediate academic or business payoff.

Re: Computer scientist Viral Shah helped build Julia from Bengaluru, India

#18
Reading this post it seems that Julia is the silver bullet for every programming problems (or at least the ones addressable in python). I guess it's not. It is just another (very useful, admittedly) tool for the job. I really can't stand when every new language or framework or technology or whatever tries to be THE silver bullet. How long it will be before we learn that such a thing doesn't exist and we are always going to learn new tools to solve problems in a hopefully more efficient way? Maybe in the future we'll have such a thing, but I bet my 2 pennies that it won't be either Julia or any of the existing languages.

Edit: speaking specifically about the language I think that it's a very good effort and it can be only a good thing for the current languages ecosystem, even if I don't appreciate some of its idiosyncrasies.

Re: Computer scientist Viral Shah helped build Julia from Bengaluru, India

#19
post #12
post #4

Why can't people just settle on Python? Julia is going to die anyways in the near future.

The same reasons people migrated to Python in the late 90s from matlab, Fortran and C++: Python addressed pain points in those languages and ecosystems. Julia addresses deficiencies in Python the language. Unfortunately, it lacks the ecosystem: until it gets the rich library set that Python has, we're stuck with Python since ecosystem is arguably more important for practical traction than the base language.

I don't know how well it works, but Julia does let you use python libraries.

    @pyimport matplotlib.pyplot as plt
    x = linspace(0,2*pi,1000); y = sin(3*x + 4*cos(2*x));
    plt.plot(x, y, color="red", linewidth=2.0, linestyle="--")
    plt.show()
https://github.com/JuliaPy/PyCall.jl

Re: Computer scientist Viral Shah helped build Julia from Bengaluru, India

#20
post #4

Why can't people just settle on Python? Julia is going to die anyways in the near future.

On an infinite time scale, you are certainly right. We're all going to die pretty soon, and so will our programming languages.

In the meantime, though, Julia seems rather healthy, and this particular Python fanboy is nevertheless interested where Julia will take us!

Julia is not an aggressor. It's not even a competitor. Rather, it is another stab at improving scientific computation. Let's focus on trying to learn from Julia instead of spreading FUD.

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