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Julia Language Co-Creators Win James H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software

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11–20 of 249 posts

Re: Julia Language Co-Creators Win James H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software

#11
post #9

I personally don't like the fact that you have structs but no classes and no instance methods, but I know this is personal and don't want to start a religious war this morning

Multi-methods are much more powerfull than instance methods, but yeah lets agree to disagree. :)

Re: Julia Language Co-Creators Win James H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software

#12
post #5

what good is philosophy if you choose arrays based on 1? https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/julia-dev/tNN7...

0-based indexing is closer to the memory representation, but 1-based indexing is closer to how we actually think about arrays. We say the first element, not the zeroth element. Nothing wrong with 1-based indexing except old habits die hard.

Re: Julia Language Co-Creators Win James H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software

#13
post #7
post #5

what good is philosophy if you choose arrays based on 1? https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/julia-dev/tNN7...

So does: APL, AWK, COBOL, Fortran, Lua, Mathematica, MATLAB, R, Smalltalk, Wolfram Because it is Mathmatics and have 1 be based on 0 makes no sense, you then have to switch between the two and it is easy to make a mistake. This is why I don't use Python and Pandas. I got burnt once and that was enough and switched to R. Sadly we are stuck with 0 based array in programming and due to a historical issue.

You have forgotten Algol, PL/I, Pascal, Oberon, Oberon-2, Active Oberon, Component Pascal, Mesa, Mesa/Cedar, Modula-2+, Modula-3, Eiffel, Basic,...

Although in Wirth inspired languages, actually the indexes are flexible, but by convention 1 gets used.

Re: Julia Language Co-Creators Win James H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software

#14

Can't wait for the language to be as widely used as Python or R. Been playing around with it at home since the 1.0 release and it really is a joy to use.

I wish that Python feels a bit of Julia's heat, as that might be the only way for more PyPy love.

Re: Julia Language Co-Creators Win James H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software

#15
post #5

what good is philosophy if you choose arrays based on 1? https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/julia-dev/tNN7...

Call it bikeshedding but I totally agree. As someone who used to use Matlab (since it was what more or less everyone else in machine learning did at the time) and was immensely relieved to switch to NumPy a few years back, I’d love to give Julia a whirl but I just can’t stomach going back to a 1 indexed language. I’m surprised nobody maintains a 0 indexed fork of Julia yet (Juli0, anyone?).

Re: Julia Language Co-Creators Win James H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software

#16
post #5

what good is philosophy if you choose arrays based on 1? https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/julia-dev/tNN7...

Fun fact: arrays in Fortran are also based on 1 by default, but they can be defined to start at 0, or even arbitrary negative numbers. The following are all valid:

    integer :: array1(5)
    integer :: array2(0:4)
    integer :: array3(5:10)
    integer :: array4(-4:4)

Re: Julia Language Co-Creators Win James H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software

#17
post #7
post #5

what good is philosophy if you choose arrays based on 1? https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/julia-dev/tNN7...

So does: APL, AWK, COBOL, Fortran, Lua, Mathematica, MATLAB, R, Smalltalk, Wolfram Because it is Mathmatics and have 1 be based on 0 makes no sense, you then have to switch between the two and it is easy to make a mistake. This is why I don't use Python and Pandas. I got burnt once and that was enough and switched to R. Sadly we are stuck with 0 based array in programming and due to a historical issue.

0 based arrays is objectively the preferred way for me and not for historical reasons. I write a lot of low level graphics algorithm stuff, and 1-based arrays would complicate index arithmetic.

like now with everything 0 based having something like:

arr[offset1 * 32 + offset2]

would be the following if all my offsets would be 1-based and arrays would be 1-based:

arr[(offset1 -1) * 32 + offset2]

which is pretty arbitrary...

Re: Julia Language Co-Creators Win James H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software

#18
post #5

what good is philosophy if you choose arrays based on 1? https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/julia-dev/tNN7...

as someone who's written a lot of Fortran and Python for the same project I fail to see the problem. I find something like row- vs. column order differences harder to deal with. 1 vs. 0 based is just a matter of choice, a developer should be able to adapt, just like tabs vs. spaces etc.

Re: Julia Language Co-Creators Win James H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software

#20
post #9

I personally don't like the fact that you have structs but no classes and no instance methods, but I know this is personal and don't want to start a religious war this morning

Don't worry, someone started a war over the 1-indexing so you likely won't get enough attention that it counts as a war :)
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