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

Post by mruts » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 1:47 AM UTC

johnsea wrote: post #125

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.

Because Pascal. And as Pascal was used as a teaching language, I don't think your 'make code harder to read and harder to write' argument holds. But certainly nowadays 'end's are not seen often; maybe this has an influence in your statement?

Post by xiaodai » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 1:52 AM UTC

you_owe_me wrote: post #48

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

Post by xiaodai » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 1:57 AM UTC

mruts wrote: post #200

yellowapple wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I mean, maybe it's not a big deal. But what value does it add? What if we had a 50 character string of random digits be the terminating identifier for a block? What about 100 characters? What about 200? Syntax shouldn't create visual noise, it should be as lightweight as possible. Maybe someone can justify why a 3 character word (end) doesn't really matter. But can someone give an argument on how it adds value versus…

Post by mruts » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 2:02 AM UTC

xiaodai wrote: post #205

mruts wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, maybe it's not a big deal. But what value does it add? What if we had a 50 character string of random digits be the terminating identifier for a block? What about 100 characters? What about 200? Syntax shouldn't create visual noise, it should be as lightweight as possible. Maybe someone can justify why a 3 character word (end) doesn't really matter. But can someone give an argument on how it adds value versus…

it's easier to read.

Post by mattkrause » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 3:46 AM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #168

antpls wrote: post #166

I'm ready to burn a part of my karma to say the following : - Naming a PL "Julia" is sexist and creepy - The language doesn't add any substantial value to PL theory or programming methodology compared to say, Python - The future of computer-human interaction is not in programming. Python will be good enough until we reach that point where we can use neural networks/AI to do most of the business tasks.

> Naming a PL "Julia" is sexist and creepy How? (I kind of assume that a big reason computer scientists would pull out that name without a specific referent in mind is the influence of the Julia set, named for Gaston Julia.) > The language doesn't add any substantial value to PL theory or programming methodology compared to say, Python Maybe; not all practical benefits in programming come from advances in methodology…