JuliaLang: The Ingredients for a Composable Programming Language • Hacker News Board

Re: JuliaLang: The Ingredients for a Composable Programming Language

#71

Post by goatlover » Mon, Feb 10, 2020, 5:18 PM UTC

awb wrote: post #57

FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python will still be used 20 years from now. The clear advantage of Python is the enormous ecosystem that is available, the millions of questions on SO giving solutions to every problem you can run into, the books and learning materials etc, programmers and corporations having invested loads of time and effort in building, maintaining and battle-testing libraries. Don't get me wrong, i think Julia is an amazing langu…

> Python will still be used 20 years from now So much technology has come and gone since 2000. If innovation continues to accelerate I'd be hesitant to predict what 2040 will look like. Programming might become so simple and automated that we won't need StackOverflow to the extent we do today. It's really hard to predict the next year or two let alone the next 20.

Programming languages from 2000 remain, though. C, C++, Java, JS, Python, etc. Even Fortran, Cobol and Lisp remain in use. There’s been attempts since the 80s to popularize visual and and higher level approaches to programming, but the traditional languages still dominate. And the newer ones like Go, Elixir and Julia are like the traditional C, Lisp and Fortrans.

Re: JuliaLang: The Ingredients for a Composable Programming Language

#72

Post by smabie » Mon, Feb 10, 2020, 5:19 PM UTC

real_eng_ wrote: post #33

smabie wrote: post #10

Julia is great. It’s significantly simpler than Python while also being much more expressive. It’s too bad the typing is only for dispatch, but hopefully someone will write a typechecker someday. I’ve found it surprisingly refreshing to not have to think about classes and just add functions on objects wherever I want. Some languages solve this with monkey patching (which is bad), others like Scala with an extension c…

Why every Julia user can't help but trash Python at every occasion? It's getting really tiring

Trashing is a little harsh, but Julia devs probably were mostly Python devs back in the day and are intimately familiar with the inadequacies of the language: the work required when you had to drop into C, the bad syntax for math, the constant conversions between ndarray, array, and lists, etc etc.

At my old bioinformatics lab, Python literally wasted thousands and thousands of collective man-hours which would have been saved by Julia if it had existed at the time. Since a lot of these researchers couldn’t really program that well, they would write code that would literally take weeks to run. And then they would call me and I would rewrite it in C and it would then take an hour or two. Julia solves this problem.

The amount of unnecessary supercomputer time (and electricity) that our lab (and others) were wasting with Python was, honestly, disgusting.

Re: JuliaLang: The Ingredients for a Composable Programming Language

#73

Post by e12e » Mon, Feb 10, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

byt143 wrote: post #34

socialdemocrat wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a big fan of Julia, but Swift is perhaps the only statically typed object-oriented language (apart from Objective-C) which I have found offers some similarity in flexibility to Swift's way of dealing with types. With the ability in Swift of adding extensions to conforming to a particular protocol to a class, you gain some of the same flexibility in Swift as in Julia. It means you can take an existing class which…

Thanks. I mean in julia you can use traits for that, but it's not built in (yet). Though there's no speed penalty, as you probably know. So this is about extending types, but it sounds like swift is strictly "better" then, since it's also statically checked? Or is there something that multiple dispatch gives that substantively better? I'm trying to get a feel for if the Swift for Tensorflow project will afford the sa…

Does swift have macros?

Looks like there's some work in bolting type checking on to Julia (small surprise, as we've seen that with eg: python and ruby as well).

I'd hazard it's easier to bolt on typechecking than a proper macro system.

Re: JuliaLang: The Ingredients for a Composable Programming Language

#74

Post by oxinabox » Mon, Feb 10, 2020, 5:25 PM UTC

real_eng_ wrote: post #33

smabie wrote: post #10

Julia is great. It’s significantly simpler than Python while also being much more expressive. It’s too bad the typing is only for dispatch, but hopefully someone will write a typechecker someday. I’ve found it surprisingly refreshing to not have to think about classes and just add functions on objects wherever I want. Some languages solve this with monkey patching (which is bad), others like Scala with an extension c…

Why every Julia user can't help but trash Python at every occasion? It's getting really tiring

This post doesn't even mention python. Not even once.

Re: JuliaLang: The Ingredients for a Composable Programming Language

#75

Post by oxinabox » Mon, Feb 10, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

ScottPJones wrote: post #42

real_eng_ wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why every Julia user can't help but trash Python at every occasion? It's getting really tiring

I haven't seen that at all - many Julia programmers are (or were) also Python programmers. I think there is a lot of respect in the Julia community for Python & the Python ecosystem. There have even been a number of Julia talks at various PyCons over the past few years.

There was a python talk at the 2019 juliacon.

Re: JuliaLang: The Ingredients for a Composable Programming Language

#76

Post by awb » Mon, Feb 10, 2020, 5:30 PM UTC

goatlover wrote: post #71

awb wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Python will still be used 20 years from now So much technology has come and gone since 2000. If innovation continues to accelerate I'd be hesitant to predict what 2040 will look like. Programming might become so simple and automated that we won't need StackOverflow to the extent we do today. It's really hard to predict the next year or two let alone the next 20.

Programming languages from 2000 remain, though. C, C++, Java, JS, Python, etc. Even Fortran, Cobol and Lisp remain in use. There’s been attempts since the 80s to popularize visual and and higher level approaches to programming, but the traditional languages still dominate. And the newer ones like Go, Elixir and Julia are like the traditional C, Lisp and Fortrans.

Sure, some do, but past adoption is not a guarantee of future adoption. 20 years in the future is a long time. Just look at Flash. Who knows, maybe a Quantum OS will dominate that doesn't support Python.

So yes, if someone will still be using Python in 20 years, I'm sure you're right. But Python just as easily could be relegated to a niche domain while other languages take over a broader range of applications.

Especially if someone's able to build a programming translator where you can easily port your code base from one language to another.

Re: JuliaLang: The Ingredients for a Composable Programming Language

#77

Post by elcomet » Mon, Feb 10, 2020, 5:31 PM UTC

goatlover wrote: post #71

awb wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Python will still be used 20 years from now So much technology has come and gone since 2000. If innovation continues to accelerate I'd be hesitant to predict what 2040 will look like. Programming might become so simple and automated that we won't need StackOverflow to the extent we do today. It's really hard to predict the next year or two let alone the next 20.

Programming languages from 2000 remain, though. C, C++, Java, JS, Python, etc. Even Fortran, Cobol and Lisp remain in use. There’s been attempts since the 80s to popularize visual and and higher level approaches to programming, but the traditional languages still dominate. And the newer ones like Go, Elixir and Julia are like the traditional C, Lisp and Fortrans.

More than this, C is from the 70s, and C++ is from the 80s.

This is 50 years from now for C. So I'd say python is likely to be still here 20 years from now, given how popular it is.

Re: JuliaLang: The Ingredients for a Composable Programming Language

#78

Post by nwvg_7257 » Mon, Feb 10, 2020, 5:36 PM UTC

UncleOxidant wrote: post #60

I really like Julia a lot and actually used it in a work project a few years back. However, there's the debugger issue. There are several debugger alternatives. It's tough to figure out which debugger is canonical (or is any of them the canonical debugger?). The one that seems to being used most at this point is Debugger.jl. However, it's exceedingly slow if you're debugging sizeable operations (matrix multiplies, fo…

Couple comments on the Debugger situation:

1. Debugger.jl is A LOT smoother if you run it in compiled mode, which is a checkbox in the Juno interface. I've found that stepping to next line is instant in compiled mode, but takes forever without it.

2. Infiltrator.jl is great at what it's designed for, which is to dump you in a REPL deep within a call stack and let you see what's going on. But, Debugger in compiled mode also does this well.

Re: JuliaLang: The Ingredients for a Composable Programming Language

#79

Post by gugagore » Mon, Feb 10, 2020, 5:38 PM UTC

FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #15

smabie wrote: post #10

Julia is great. It’s significantly simpler than Python while also being much more expressive. It’s too bad the typing is only for dispatch, but hopefully someone will write a typechecker someday. I’ve found it surprisingly refreshing to not have to think about classes and just add functions on objects wherever I want. Some languages solve this with monkey patching (which is bad), others like Scala with an extension c…

Python will still be used 20 years from now. The clear advantage of Python is the enormous ecosystem that is available, the millions of questions on SO giving solutions to every problem you can run into, the books and learning materials etc, programmers and corporations having invested loads of time and effort in building, maintaining and battle-testing libraries. Don't get me wrong, i think Julia is an amazing langu…

> the millions of questions on SO giving solutions to every problem you can run into

I definitely know what you mean. I too have the experience of typing in basically natural language queries into Google and have stack overflow turn it into copy-paste-able code for me.

But what's also true is that in 20 years the problems being solved will likely be bigger, and more complicated, and in many cases we'll be solving them on platforms that require good abstractions over multiple cores. So none of that is really in Python's wheelhouse. (Complexity is an issue because abstrations in Python almost always come at a cost.)

Re: JuliaLang: The Ingredients for a Composable Programming Language

#80

Post by oxinabox » Mon, Feb 10, 2020, 5:38 PM UTC

tgflynn wrote: post #27

cultus wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People write large-scale systems in dynamically-typed languages all the time. Multiple dispatch and macros make clean scaling easier than it would be in most other dynamic languages. Its competitors in numerical performance are C/C++ and Fortran, which are both minefields (C much more so). Julia is definitely safer in practice than these kind of languages with weak, unsafe type systems. I'm not saying static types do…

> multiple dispatch, which is strictly more powerful. In a language that supports classes I can have class B inherit from class A and automatically provide all of class A's functionality without adding a single extra line of code. I can extend class B's functionality by adding only code that is specific to it. I don't see how to do that with multiple dispatch, at least the way it's implemented in Julia.

Generally via wrapping (Composition).

``` struct Foo struct SpecialFoo{Tand then delegating calls to the wrapped object