51–60 of 249 posts
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. :)
With computational power becoming cheaper and cheaper - will we have two-language problem anymore?
We're not going to have a computer that can solve the Schrodinger Equation for a brain anytime soon.
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.
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 seamlessl…
I was unaware that Julia was homoiconic...I'm somewhat of a Lisp fanboy so I might need to give the language another chance.
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
Jokes asides, congratulations to Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, and Viral B. Shah, well deserved!
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
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 seamlessl…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 seamlessl…
Please don't vilify Python or R thinking that will help with Julia's adoption or popularity. If Julia is as awesome as its evangelists say, it will gracefully displace its competitors without the need of a smear campaign