Why Julia • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Julia

#251

Post by disgruntledphd2 » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 9:44 AM UTC

kgwgk wrote: post #156

Cosi1125 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wise words here. In my humble opinion, applying S's syntactic sugar on top of Scheme-forged core did more bad than good to R. Most of R's quirks stem from the authors' desire to keep it as compatible with S as possible. As for the two approaches to solving problems (TIMTOWTDI vs Python's "one true way") I think that's a matter of personal preference; I, personally, appreciate the freedom that R gives me. Also, it mig…

> Most of R's quirks stem from the authors' desire to keep it as compatible with S as possible. On the other hand, if it was not for that compatibility with S we would not be having this conversation: R would be just a footnote in the history of statistical computing like Lisp-Stat.

Exactly! I probably didn't make the trade-offs clear in my original post. I believe that the massive price increases in S-plus licensing may have driven lots of people to start using R, which would definitely not have happened without the S-compatibility.

Re: Why Julia

#252

Post by pkofod » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 9:52 AM UTC

enriquto wrote: post #19

agumonkey wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't find it slow, but: $ time julia -e 'print(1)' 1 real 0m0.438s user 0m0.300s sys 0m0.118s $ time python -c 'print(1)' 1 real 0m0.040s user 0m0.036s sys 0m0.003s it is slower.. That said, instanciating julia every step of a bash loop.. I think it requires a jvm mindset, warmup once and iterate inside rather than outside.

> I think it requires a jvm mindset, warmup once and iterate inside rather than outside. I do not have this mindset then. I prefer tools who are mindset oblivious. They are really useful! For example, imagine I have a collection of a few hundred images with their projection matrices (in text files). I want to crop them and apply a simple imagemagick operation (which is not available from inside julia). The elementary…

Why can you not call you imagemagick operation from julia? Can't you just `run(``)` it?

Re: Why Julia

#253

Post by tremors_123 » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 1:11 PM UTC

ethelward wrote: post #250

antpls wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all those papers, there at least one member of the team in the author list, or a member of a partner organization (Intel, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, etc). I wouldn't call them fair independent reviews of the language.

Are you really complaining that the people writing about the tool are the ones developing it? Whose opinion do you want, the Pope? Would a divine sanction be enough for you?

Would a divine sanction be enough for you?

No, but a reliable and independent opinion will do it. And to be honest, the Julia fanboys are becoming increasingly bothersome and pernicious to the data-science community with their over the top and heavy handed evangelism

Re: Why Julia

#254

Post by rocksportrocker » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 1:14 PM UTC

Julia looks for me more like an academic exercise to show you you can come up with a "scripting like" language which is also fast.

It looks julia developers implemented nice looking features, which can cause problems:

   pi = 3
   print(pi)

works, but

   print(pi)
   pi = 3

not (second version makes magic import which imports a constant).

Same for omitting multiplication "*":

   3(x + 1)

is ok, but

   x(x + 1)

not (because julia assumes a function call here).

These adds lots of problems for larger programs and maintainability.

Re: Why Julia

#255

Post by enriquto » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 3:12 PM UTC

pkofod wrote: post #252

enriquto wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it requires a jvm mindset, warmup once and iterate inside rather than outside. I do not have this mindset then. I prefer tools who are mindset oblivious. They are really useful! For example, imagine I have a collection of a few hundred images with their projection matrices (in text files). I want to crop them and apply a simple imagemagick operation (which is not available from inside julia). The elementary…

Why can you not call you imagemagick operation from julia? Can't you just `run(``)` it?

This is a part of a quite large system that does a lot of things. I do not want to wrap everything inside julia, that would force me to rewrite everything in julia. I just need to invert a few 4x4 linear systems from inside a shell script. I agree that this is not a very representative use case, and maybe it is irrelevant for most people. Yet, if I try to evangelize julia in my lab this problem blocks it, and it is better to stick to octave.

Re: Why Julia

#256

Post by lenkite » Wed, Feb 27, 2019, 11:45 AM UTC

dnautics wrote: post #101

RivieraKid wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because sometimes it's better for readability and conceptual simplicity to structure the code as objects connected to each other. Most of large-scale successful projects, often written by better developers than me or you, use OOP.

And 80% of the internet switches (Cisco and juniper) are controlled by erlang. So? I think you're looking at this wrong. Part of the reason why so many large scale products use OO, is because they use Java, and java is awesome if you're working at such a large organization that your productivity is most easily measured by pointy haired managers who count how many LOC you've written ;) As for readability and conceptua…

Erlang is more purely object-oriented than Java. These are the words from its creator itself

http://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop

Re: Why Julia

#257

Post by ethelward » Thu, Feb 28, 2019, 10:05 AM UTC

johnisgood wrote: post #103

ethelward wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you said yourself, you have no performances problem with R and Python, so I do not think you need to learn Julia. However, in fields dealing with larger datasets ( e.g. genetics, astrophysics, ...), Python and R are real bottlenecks in data processing pipelines, and are thus often replaced by programs in C/C++/Java/etc. Having a language with the expressiveness and dynamism of Julia on the one hand, and performanc…

Do they use Fortran in those fields?

In astrophysics yes (although I only follow the fields through friends), quite a lot of linear algebra/physics reference libraries are in Fortran, and new programs are still being developed in the more modern versions of it.

In Bioinformatics, not at all. Or at least in no direct way that I'm aware of. Sure, R packages indirectly call upon Fortran libraries (LAPACK et al.), but user facing programs are mostly, from my experience, written in C, C++, Java, Python & Perl.