Some Insights from a Julia Developer

Post by astrobe_ » Sat, Oct 14, 2017, 5:56 PM UTC

Thaxll wrote: post #64

jernfrost wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The improvements are not minor they are massive. Citing rust shows that the advantage of Julia has not been explained well enough. Julia allows you to write as performant code as Rust with a much smaller investment in learning. You cite your concern for spending time learning something new. That makes no sense considering the high learning curve and complexity of Rust compared to Julia. Julia is quite fast to learn a…

Performance is not everything, people are obsessed with it and it's a mistake. - libraries - community - tools Are much more important.

Post by BeetleB » Sat, Oct 14, 2017, 6:21 PM UTC

88e282102ae2e5b wrote: post #17

It's great and all, but I can't justify switching languages for minor improvements over Python + numpy/scipy. I'd be abandoning: * My deep knowledge and experience with Python * My entire codebase * The ability to work on projects with colleagues who don't also switch * The certainty that when I leave my current job, someone will be able to pick up after me * Zero-based indexing I've started to do some work in Rust w…

Post by dnautics » Sat, Oct 14, 2017, 6:35 PM UTC

88e282102ae2e5b wrote: post #17

It's great and all, but I can't justify switching languages for minor improvements over Python + numpy/scipy. I'd be abandoning: * My deep knowledge and experience with Python * My entire codebase * The ability to work on projects with colleagues who don't also switch * The certainty that when I leave my current job, someone will be able to pick up after me * Zero-based indexing I've started to do some work in Rust w…

Post by conistonwater » Sat, Oct 14, 2017, 6:56 PM UTC

ChrisRackauckas wrote: post #46

ChrisRackauckas wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) No, they are just different dispatches to getindex. 2) No, iteration is through indices(A) or eachindex(A), etc., which are the preferred way of iterating anyways. You shouldn't do 1:length(A) which is a MATLABism that works but I would say isn't good Julia. 3) Defining new dispatches for length and size is a pretty standard use of the language? "Non-standard" arrays with non-standard indexing already work in lots…

@attractivechaos I don't know how to reply to your last reply, so I'll do it here. 1:length(A) is bad because it's using a standard construction for intervals of numbers, but using it for indices. We don't want to get rid of it because 1:5 or 0:0.2:1 is something that is very common and necessary, but I don't see how to tell one that they should instead use eachindex(A) except through proper docs. 1:length(A) is so c…

Post by elcritch » Sat, Oct 14, 2017, 7:02 PM UTC

Certhas wrote: post #104

3JPLW wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: did you read the post at all? Even the quick summary addresses this. Chris' whole point is that the biggest benefits of switching to Julia will be felt by the folks that are developing the packages and libraries for others to use. He's advocating that the best way to get you to want to switch isn't incremental language-level features, but rather it's first-in-class domain-specific packages. This is s…

This is now happening. The DifferentialEquations Library in Julia seems to be best in class. More importantly: I can imagine writing algorithmic improvements to it for my use case, which is where I hit a wall with python + scipy/numpy/numba. I can't go and use my python skill to teach a scipy routine about some feature I need.