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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

#61

Post by lenticular »

you_owe_me wrote: post #58
lenticular wrote: post #46

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

Python does have excellent libraries and it fits many people's mental model of programming, but not mine. I still use it often. However, for a dynamic language, it is simply not very expressive. It has no multi-line lambdas, OO syntax that I find a bit awkward, and some other limitations. These can be seen as advantages, since they enforce the "there's only one way to do it" philosophy, but that doesn't work for me.

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

#62

Post by phkahler »

tombert wrote: post #42
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.

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 sa…

>> 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.

It's not the 0th element. It is the 1st element and has an offset of 0 from the beginning of the array.

Not saying it's better or worse, but that if you change the words you use to describe it, you may find it easier to use.

To my surprise, I just learned that ranges in Rust don't include the end number which felt incredibly stupid from a conceptual point of view (python too). But is syntactically useful when doing:

for x in 0..len(my_array) {

My preference would be that a range include the end number and the language provide more python-like iterators and list comprehensions. I am aware that there is a library that provides more python-like syntax, but that doesn't change the oddness of ranges in either language. I guess I just need to remember that the interval is open on one end. Which brings to mind the notion of using [0..n] or [0..n) in a language...

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

#64

Post by contravariant »

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.

For what it's worth mathematics is more than flexible enough to handle both 0 and 1 based indexing. Using 1 based just looks neater since you can count x_1, ..., x_n rather than x_0, ..., x_{n-1}. Sometimes both are used at the same time e.g. if you add an extra coefficient at the start rather than at the end, this happens particularly when dealing with wedge products where the parity of the new index matters.

Also it's usually a bad sign if you need to worry too much about what index you used, you might be better of using index sets with whatever structure you need (and only the structure you need). In program languages that support it generous application of ranges and generators tends to get rid of most complications.

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

#65

Post by coldtea »

sammorrowdrums wrote: post #22
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.

It's the difference between numbering the contents of the list (1 indexing), and measuring the distance from the beginning of the list to the start of the item (0 indexing). Personally I'm happy to switch between both, and they both have positives and negatives when I actually write code. 0 indexing is not incorrect, or incompatible with maths, it is just a different way of conceiving of lists/arrays by considering t…

>It's the difference between numbering the contents of the list (1 indexing), and measuring the distance from the beginning of the list to the start of the item (0 indexing).

The problem is that one is indeed an indexing (numbering the contents 1...X...N and asking for item X, customers[X]), whereas the other is not, but is used as an indexing (e.g. customers[5] is not getting the 5th item but the sixth).

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

#66

Post by lenticular »

tombert wrote: post #54
lenticular wrote: post #46

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…

I'm not sure how I feel about multi-dispatch...I've had a few headaches chasing down problems with multimethods in Clojure...I'd have to try using Julia full-time to see how it feels. I was unaware that Julia was homoiconic...I'm somewhat of a Lisp fanboy so I might need to give the language another chance.

There's pretty big differences in usage between multimethods in Clojure and Julia. I've used both a decent amount. All functions in Julia are multimethods by default. If you don't use type annotations, a new method will be generated whenever you call the function with new argument types. This explicit type specialization is a very important part of why Julia can have such a consistently fast JIT despite its dynamicity.

Errors from missing or conflicting methods tend to not happen much in practice.

https://docs.julialang.org/en/v0.7.0/manual/methods/

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

#67

Post by coldtea »

phkahler wrote: post #62
tombert wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sa…

>> 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. It's not the 0th element. It is the 1st element and has an offset of 0 from the beginning of the array. Not saying it's better or worse, but that if you change the words you use to describe it, you may find it easier to use. To my surprise, I just learned that ranges in Rust don't incl…

>It's not the 0th element. It is the 1st element and has an offset of 0 from the beginning of the array.

It should be indexed with its position then a[1], as we do in all other aspects of life (and in math), and not with it's offset.

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

#68

Post by umvi »

phkahler wrote: post #62
tombert wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sa…

>> 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. It's not the 0th element. It is the 1st element and has an offset of 0 from the beginning of the array. Not saying it's better or worse, but that if you change the words you use to describe it, you may find it easier to use. To my surprise, I just learned that ranges in Rust don't incl…

Python almost always does what I want.

If I say `for x in range(10)` it iterates exactly 10 times, starting at zero (which is convenient for 0-index lists in python). It would be extremely counter-intuitive if it did [0,10] as it would iterate 11 times. I agree though that it would be much less ambiguous if you could just do `for x in [0..10)`, for example.

Current implementation requires the least amount of "off-by-one" corrections for most tasks, IMO.

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

#69

Post by coldtea »

francasso wrote: post #56

I'll say only one thing: 1 based indexing. Jokes asides, congratulations to Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, and Viral B. Shah, well deserved!

>I'll say only one thing: 1 based indexing.

You mean you'll say only zero thing?

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

#70

Post by maxmouchet »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #26
xvilka wrote: post #24

Julia needs something like IPython/Jupyter but without Python.

the "Ju" in Jupyter is for julia, do you mean you want Jupyter without the python support?

I was curious about this and it turns out you're (partially) right: https://github.com/jupyter/design/wiki/Jupyter-Logo#where-do...
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