Some Insights from a Julia Developer
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Some Insights from a Julia Developer
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Re: Some Insights from a Julia Developer
#2"i like julia too"
Re: Some Insights from a Julia Developer
#3Everything sounds great about Julia but it's lacking sufficient critical mass to develop useful packages to make scientists and data analysts effective.
At the moment the bottleneck in our scientific computing and data analysis workflow is not waiting for code to run but rather quickly inplementing, evaluating, and iterating different models on datasets.
Re: Some Insights from a Julia Developer
#4One issue I have with Julia is that it is fast the second time you run your code. And developing code is mainly running things just once. In practice you might find yourself waiting on compilation a lot.
Re: Some Insights from a Julia Developer
#5Strangely, the only mention of Cython is to point at that we have had less developers than Julia: "as evidenced by the over 500 committers to just the Base language, more than projects like Cython has ever had!"
Re: Some Insights from a Julia Developer
#6Too bad they somehow thought it was a good idea to make the syntax resemble MATLAB of all languages. Perhaps most of the nausea inducing warts could be worked around with some kind of transcompilation, although some semantic issues, such as one-based indexing, would remain.
It'll be a sad day if Julia starts to get such popularity that high quality libraries will be Julia-only.
Re: Some Insights from a Julia Developer
#7Too bad they somehow thought it was a good idea to make the syntax resemble MATLAB of all languages. Perhaps most of the nausea inducing warts could be worked around with some kind of transcompilation, although some semantic issues, such as one-based indexing, would remain. It'll be a sad day if Julia starts to get such popularity that high quality libraries will be Julia-only.
One-based indexing is not a semantic issue, it's a language-design decision you may disagree with.
Re: Some Insights from a Julia Developer
#8One issue I have with Julia is that it is fast the second time you run your code. And developing code is mainly running things just once. In practice you might find yourself waiting on compilation a lot.
That all depends on factoring. If running your code once means evaluating some function hundred times, then that's no issue.
Re: Some Insights from a Julia Developer
#9The packages-first attitude feels significant to me. A language that “users” enjoy but package developers also enjoy seems important. I hadn’t thought about language choice from a heavily package-development weighted perspective before. It seems obvious in retrospect though, which is probably a sign of something cool.
A version of this would be: how can good package development be as easy as possible, and how can package use be as easy as possible?
I haven’t done any serious work in Julia mainly because the python libraries are mature, good, and performant enough. I can’t speak for everyone, but for end users in science labs library support is perhaps the biggest consideration for language choice.
Re: Some Insights from a Julia Developer
#10Too bad they somehow thought it was a good idea to make the syntax resemble MATLAB of all languages. Perhaps most of the nausea inducing warts could be worked around with some kind of transcompilation, although some semantic issues, such as one-based indexing, would remain. It'll be a sad day if Julia starts to get such popularity that high quality libraries will be Julia-only.
One-based indexing is not a semantic issue, it's a language-design decision you may disagree with.
Which happens to common across many languages outside C universe.
Some languages, like the Algol ones, even have user defined indexing.
So it is not neither 0 or 1, rather whatever the min value of the index happens to be.