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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

#151

Post by dragonwriter »

threatofrain wrote: post #149
coldtea wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a European I'm not really surprised, but it's not exactly the same thing. It's not like the ground level is considered "the 0th floor" and thus we use 0-based indexing. In most European countries the ground floor is not considered the same thing as the others. As Wikipedia puts it: "In most of Europe, the "first floor" is the first level above ground level". We consider and count as floors the "layers" above the g…

Ground floor, 1st floor, 2nd floor still sounds very much like 0-based indexing. Is the objection just that people don't literally say the word "zero", but instead say ground?

“Ground floor” is not the European name; the names are things like “Ground of the roadway” (literal word-by-word translation of the French name), “first floor”, “second floor”, etc.

It's no more zero-based indexing than naming relations as “sibling”,“first cousin”,“second cousin” is, just because some hypothetical culture that also uses 1-based indexing but counts siblings as first cousins might rationalize our system as starting with “zeroth cousins” where they have “first cousins”.

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

#152

Post by yellowapple »

mruts wrote: post #50

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.

Ruby and Elixir both made the same decision, and I don't feel like it's had an actual negative impact, for me at least; I've found both languages to be delightfully readable. I haven't dabbled very much in Julia since the pre-1.0 days, but I don't recall it being any more or less jarring.

I suppose it could indeed be jarring if you're not already used to languages which use 'end' to terminate blocks, but after awhile your brain will just start to treat 'end' synonymously with '}' and all will be right with the world.

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

#153

Post by uptownfunk »

giornogiovanna wrote: post #124
uptownfunk wrote: post #63

Want to drive adoption? Introduce it in schools.

Evil but true. I think the easiest way in would be to rally up some university students into starting a "Julia Club" or maybe even a "Julia Evangelism Strike Force".

Even further than that, you need faculty to teach with it. I know I use R a lot primarily because that's what I learnt at Cal, it was easy, and it worked. Things are probably shifting towards Python in schools now, but I think that's the best way you're going to get a lot of users using it persistently in their careers.

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

#154

Post by mcabbott »

dragonwriter wrote: post #151
threatofrain wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ground floor, 1st floor, 2nd floor still sounds very much like 0-based indexing. Is the objection just that people don't literally say the word "zero", but instead say ground?

“Ground floor” is not the European name; the names are things like “Ground of the roadway” (literal word-by-word translation of the French name), “first floor”, “second floor”, etc. It's no more zero-based indexing than naming relations as “sibling”,“first cousin”,“second cousin” is, just because some hypothetical culture that also uses 1-based indexing but counts siblings as first cousins might rationalize our syste…

There are also differences of building styles, maybe this is part of how we ended up with different terminology. The prototypical Parisian building has a paved driveway to the courtyard which is on the ground level. The prototypical New England house has a first floor which is a wooden thing with floorboards, 3 feet or so above ground.

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

#155

Post by pjmlp »

mac01021 wrote: post #37
amrrs wrote: post #28

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

Yes (if you're asking what I think you're asking). Computers are never fast enough. Even if they get 1000x faster, we'll want to squeeze every drop of performance out by using C or whatever.

As someone that remembers when C compilers for home computers weren't able to compete with junior devs hand writing Assembly, it always feels interesting to see this kind of remarks.

Thankfully the changes in modern hardware architectures have triggered many runtime devs to start having another look at their compiler backends, improving vector instructions support and access to GPGPU features, instead of sticking with just good enough for CRUD apps.

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

#156

Post by lewis500 »

make3 wrote: 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

I think this mainly makes a difference with regard to reading the code. I'm looking at a struct in someone's code and ask myself "How does this thing get used?" With classes I'll be able to see its methods right away, and if it had inherited then I could see right away which parent to go check.

But the problem is not that big. Maybe the methods are right next to the struct, or if I search the codebase for the struct I can find which methods use it. Still, would be cool if Juno had some feature like "show which methods use this."

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

#157

Post by threatofrain »

dragonwriter wrote: post #151
threatofrain wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ground floor, 1st floor, 2nd floor still sounds very much like 0-based indexing. Is the objection just that people don't literally say the word "zero", but instead say ground?

“Ground floor” is not the European name; the names are things like “Ground of the roadway” (literal word-by-word translation of the French name), “first floor”, “second floor”, etc. It's no more zero-based indexing than naming relations as “sibling”,“first cousin”,“second cousin” is, just because some hypothetical culture that also uses 1-based indexing but counts siblings as first cousins might rationalize our syste…

If I heard that in other countries their use of 1st floor was 1 off from me, and they had a name for whatever was before 1, then what they have is like a zero, especially if some elevators use the literal 0 to mean the ground floor.

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

#158

Post by currymj »

WhompingWindows wrote: post #140

As a current R user, and former SAS user, can someone give me an elevator pitch as to why Julia is worth my time? I use a lot of the tidyverse and some more niche epidemiology/stats packages in R, I'm also pulling in datasets on the order of 1-10 million rows from MS SQL.

the elevator pitch is, it's an easy to use language, you can vectorize things if you want, but also if you hand-write loops it will be very fast. Whereas in R, hand-writing loops brings you to the 3rd circle of hell [1].

the more general version of the elevator pitch is that being in an environment where all the code is written in one high-level language that is still fast is qualitatively different. you can combine things in all kinds of strange ways with surprisingly little work. I.e. the DiffEqFlux package takes about a hundred lines of code to glue together a GPU neural network library and some very advanced differential equation solvers.

realistically, it sounds like you are hitting all of R's strongest points currently, though. I suspect right now you would be pretty dissatisfied with Julia.

1: https://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf

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

#159

Post by Athas »

eigenspace wrote: post #127
kgwgk wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Julia is homoiconic It depends on what you understand by homoiconic: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31733766/in-what-sense-a...

This is why the language creators usually avoid using the word 'homoiconic' because every time one uses that word there's a finite probability of being bogged down in an incredibly uninteresting semantic argument. Instead, people prefer to say that julia code is just another (tree-like) data-structure in the language and it can be manipulated at runtime with functions or compile time with macros or at parse time with…

Then why not just say 'Julia has macros'? Lightly perusing the description of Julia's features, that seems like a clear way of expressing what it is.

(I also vaguely recall Julia describing its type system as "dependent" in way that goes against convention. Maybe they just liked controversy in the early days!)

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

#160

Post by yellowapple »

coldtea wrote: post #74
amrrs wrote: post #28

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

Computational power doesn't become cheaper and cheaper. If anything it's the inverse: Not only Moore's law has stopped working for several years now ([1]), but we have also greatly increased what we do with computers (e.g. the whole dataset of an 80s company could fit on a 1GB disk -- today we routinely need to process terabytes of data both streaming and offline -- see also 4K video, webasm vs simple websites of 199…

I don't know if I'd call processing terabytes of data "routine" even in this day and age. Same deal with 4k video, VR/AR, etc. Yeah, some particularly large or cutting-edge companies might be doing that, but the average business will likely not have nearly as extreme of needs.

Re: the "webasm vs simple websites of 1999" factor, I think that's a case of designers (and the programmers enabling them) self-inducing such problems. Most business sites don't actually need all those newfangled features and tools; plain old HTML5+CSS3 (plus maybe a little bit of JS here and there) is more than good enough.

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