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

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

#41

Post by baldfat »

nadam wrote: post #17
baldfat wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 arbitr…

Historically 0 based is for low level languages. 0 based makes sense for C.

My issue is higher level languages Python, Java, C# there is plenty of things that just are complicated and doing arrays off 0 is one of them. Doing data science or statistics just makes it obvious that you have two different sets on numbers. 1 doesn't mean the same thing in every instance in your programming and the functional programming side of me hates that.

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

#42

Post by tombert »

baldfat wrote: post #7
spot wrote: 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.

I had a job about 7 years ago doing Coldfusion and Flash. Coldfusion is 1 indexed and Actionscript is 0 indexed...this threw me off enough to the point of having a near-religious aversion towards explicit indexing, and while I've largely drunk the functional Kool-aid where I almost exclusively use maps and filters and reduce.

I really do with the 1 indexing had stayed around, since I feel like it's more natural to say the 1st element, instead of the 0th.

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

#43

Post by montalbano »

tombert wrote: post #39

I built a very simple neural-network app a few years ago with Julia, and while the project was fun and I didn't think the language was bad by any means, as someone who does software for a living I had trouble seeing why compsci people really got into it. I could totally see someone like my dad using it (he's an aerospace engineer, not software), but I have friends who work in compsci in academia trying to evangelize…

To name a few: beautiful type system, optional typing, multiple dispatch...

edit: as another comment mentioned, metaprogramming is also great!

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

#44

Post by asgraham »

dannyz wrote: post #32
linkingday wrote: post #6

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 think Python has a large advantage in this space since it is not as specialized. For many projects that I work on the actual core number crunching code is small (or part of a library I don't have to worry about). The rest of the code could be scraping data, or a web application. These are things that there are numerous packages available for in Python but seem to fall outside the focus of Julia.

I would highly recommend reading this recent post in the Julia forums [1]. It's from a "relatively new" Julia user explaining why Julia is actually a very good general purpose language, e.g. for string manipulation of scraped data. You do have a good point about packages, though: The problem is that the user base is smaller than Python's so some packages have yet to be created. And since the userbase is currently largely numerical programmers, non-numerical packages are more likely to be missing.

[1] https://discourse.julialang.org/t/not-only-for-technical-com...

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

#45

Post by JustFinishedBSG »

amrrs wrote: post #28

With computational power becoming cheaper and cheaper - will we have two-language problem anymore?

The target of julia is computional sciences. Sure for a web apps you don't care if your language is 30x slower, 1ms or 30us who cares, you can just rely on the raw speed of your overpowered computer and enjoy your favorite language.

But when it's between waiting 1 day or 1 month for your results you start caring quite a lot

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

#46

Post by lenticular »

tombert wrote: post #39

I built a very simple neural-network app a few years ago with Julia, and while the project was fun and I didn't think the language was bad by any means, as someone who does software for a living I had trouble seeing why compsci people really got into it. I could totally see someone like my dad using it (he's an aerospace engineer, not software), but I have friends who work in compsci in academia trying to evangelize…

It's extremely expressive. Notably, Julia is homoiconic, with full lisp-style macros. It also has multiple dispatch, which is a far more general technique that OO single-dispatch. This makes it very easy to define modular interfaces that work much like statically-typed type classes in Haskell. This allows you, for example, to define a custom matrix type for your bespoke sparse matrix layout and have it work seamlessly with existing linear algebra types.

I've done a lot of work in both Python with Scipy/Numpy, and Julia. Python is painfully inexpressive in comparison. Not only this, but Julia has excellent type inference. Combined with the JIT, this makes it very fast. Inner numerical loops can be nearly as fast as C/Fortran.

Expanding on the macro system, this has allowed things like libraries that give easy support for GPU programming, fast automatic differentiation, seamless Python interop, etc.

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

#47

Post by vanderZwan »

xiphias2 wrote: post #35

Multi-methods really are a lot of fun, but I'm missing the Trait system (instead of the object hierarchy) that makes Rust so modular. I know that there are some tries to put it into Julia, but none of them is well supported.

I thought Tim Holy's Trait Tick was considered the de facto way to use traits in Julia?

https://github.com/mauro3/SimpleTraits.jl

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

#48

Post by you_owe_me »

The authors claim Julia is a general programming language, but after a few tries I am not totally sure about that. Yes, it's a nice programming language for scientific computing but I am afraid its usefulness stops there.

Matlab is (was?) the default tool for computational science, and Julia borrows lots from it. I'd say it's safe to put Julia in the same category with Matlab and Mathematica

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

#49

Post by lenticular »

dannyz wrote: post #32
linkingday wrote: post #6

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 think Python has a large advantage in this space since it is not as specialized. For many projects that I work on the actual core number crunching code is small (or part of a library I don't have to worry about). The rest of the code could be scraping data, or a web application. These are things that there are numerous packages available for in Python but seem to fall outside the focus of Julia.

Julia would be ideal for those task as well, but alas the libraries aren't there. Julia can easily call Python functions with PyCall, although I still wouldn't want to extensively use a complicated Python library in this way.

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

#50

Post by mruts »

Julia is interesting, but the block syntax is a little off-putting. I'm not sure why someone would design a language that uses 'end' to delineate a block. Curly brackets make sense. Tabs make sense. But 'end'? All it does is make code harder to read and harder to write.
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