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Julia 1.4

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Re: Julia 1.4

#61

Post by dklend122 »

Julia is an amazing, elegant and beautiful language. It's almost perfectly suited for scientific computing and ML. However, I'm not very bullish on its future given s4tf

Swift can get you 90% of the way there, and that extra 10% can be more than made up the by the efforts of apple, google and other companies (including money, network/clout, kaggle which is owned by google etc). Despite predictions to the contrary, Chris Lattner's departure doesn't seem to have slowed down the project, and more team members from google have been added since.

Swift is rapidly approaching usability on windows with investment from google.

Further, at some point google will facilitate Swift's use for android apps, and then Swift's popularity will skyrocket, and all those developers will be naturally inclined to check out the ML stuff. Even facebook is getting in on the party: https://twitter.com/nadavrot/status/1241150682104606720

In addition, Swift has its own benefits over julia for production and large codebases, such as compilation to small binaries and static typing. Julia doesn't have a good story for either of these (yet?), and chasing down type instabilities in larger code isn't fun.

Re: Julia 1.4

#62

Post by the_monster »

komuher wrote: post #44
the_monster wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please double check your grammar before posting

Sorry im not native :( I tried my best

Nobody is expecting pristine English here, but basic grammar rules must be obeyed.

I don't intend to discourage you. I am just asking you to review carefully before posting.

Re: Julia 1.4

#63

Post by ddragon »

dklend122 wrote: post #61

Julia is an amazing, elegant and beautiful language. It's almost perfectly suited for scientific computing and ML. However, I'm not very bullish on its future given s4tf Swift can get you 90% of the way there, and that extra 10% can be more than made up the by the efforts of apple, google and other companies (including money, network/clout, kaggle which is owned by google etc). Despite predictions to the contrary, Ch…

You mean the future of Julia or the future of Flux? While an amazing accomplishment (that is still on the way of becoming truly mature, just like s4tf), Flux is just one of Julia's current ML libraries, and it definitely doesn't feel like a Rails (or maybe Flutter) situation in which the library is larger than the language. ML isn't even Julia's core target (it just happens to fits extremely well with numerical and scientific processing).

Julia will be just fine even if s4tf somehow steals all the mindshare (especially since a mature differentiable programming library will inevitably serve as inspiration for Flux itself) as the language and target audience is not very similar to Swift's and as such Flux and s4tf will also find different niches (for example one can be more used on high performance scientific research thanks to Julia's ecosystem and focus while the other can focus on mobile deployment of ML models).

Re: Julia 1.4

#64

Post by dklend122 »

ddragon wrote: post #63
dklend122 wrote: post #61

Julia is an amazing, elegant and beautiful language. It's almost perfectly suited for scientific computing and ML. However, I'm not very bullish on its future given s4tf Swift can get you 90% of the way there, and that extra 10% can be more than made up the by the efforts of apple, google and other companies (including money, network/clout, kaggle which is owned by google etc). Despite predictions to the contrary, Ch…

You mean the future of Julia or the future of Flux? While an amazing accomplishment (that is still on the way of becoming truly mature, just like s4tf), Flux is just one of Julia's current ML libraries, and it definitely doesn't feel like a Rails (or maybe Flutter) situation in which the library is larger than the language. ML isn't even Julia's core target (it just happens to fits extremely well with numerical and s…

If my scenario holds, at some point Swift's scientific computing ecosystem will rival and overtake Julia's.

I don't see the ML ecosystem developing in isolation because there's going to be overlap, especially as more and more code can be differentiated.

Re: Julia 1.4

#65

Post by DoreenMichele »

komuher wrote: post #44
the_monster wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please double check your grammar before posting

Sorry im not native :( I tried my best

The account calling you out for poor grammar is only three hours old.

Please don't take that as some reasonable representative of general HN culture or sentiment.

Re: Julia 1.4

#66

Post by systemvoltage »

eigenspace wrote: post #57

Surprised by some of the negativity here! I've been extensively using julia for my graduate physics research and a lot of hobby programming for almost 3 years now and absolutely love it. It's a beautifully designed language with incredibly responsive and wise developers and 1.4.0 is a great release I've been on 1.4 release candidates for over a month and haven't had a single issue, and love the new features and impro…

The negativity is warranted if you've ever run Julia or had to maintain it in production. Use it for your own Jupyter notebooks and personal analysis? Great! Need to debug some weird obscure error (which Julia does a poor job of reporting to the user, let alone which line in the stack trace) while having production pressure to get it up and running again? Julia is unquestionably, unarguably and utterly unsuitable. Do not use it in any production workflow, heed my advice as a maintainer of Julia repos and the tech debt that graduate students have created in our company (I am sorry but just stating the facts). You're still unsure? Let's switch sides, you maintain our company's production Julia repositories and I will take your spot to write beautiful code in a couple of hobby projects. I guarantee you, with absolute certainty, you will come down to your knees. You'll lose sleep. You'll hate management for letting this happen.

Re: Julia 1.4

#67

Post by auxym »

the_monster wrote: post #30
m4r35n357 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not too surprising. Java was _designed_ by ex Unix engineers at a time that the word "engineer" meant something. Now we have the cloud/web stack and _Javascript_. The bar was low enough for Julia to sound good at the start, but it gives the impression of being "designed" "on-the-fly".

Engineering implies scientific rigour and high intellect. So, no wonder software developers, usually a derided and mistreated collective, just love being called engineer...

Engineering (as in PEng in the US, but my jurisdiction just calls it Engineer) also implies liability, and a risk of losing your license if you fuck up.

Re: Julia 1.4

#68

Post by burntsushi »

systemvoltage wrote: post #66
eigenspace wrote: post #57

Surprised by some of the negativity here! I've been extensively using julia for my graduate physics research and a lot of hobby programming for almost 3 years now and absolutely love it. It's a beautifully designed language with incredibly responsive and wise developers and 1.4.0 is a great release I've been on 1.4 release candidates for over a month and haven't had a single issue, and love the new features and impro…

The negativity is warranted if you've ever run Julia or had to maintain it in production. Use it for your own Jupyter notebooks and personal analysis? Great! Need to debug some weird obscure error (which Julia does a poor job of reporting to the user, let alone which line in the stack trace) while having production pressure to get it up and running again? Julia is unquestionably, unarguably and utterly unsuitable. Do…

Do you have any links to other material where I could read up on some of the problems folks have faced using Julia in production? Thanks!

Re: Julia 1.4

#69

Post by ddragon »

dklend122 wrote: post #64
ddragon wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean the future of Julia or the future of Flux? While an amazing accomplishment (that is still on the way of becoming truly mature, just like s4tf), Flux is just one of Julia's current ML libraries, and it definitely doesn't feel like a Rails (or maybe Flutter) situation in which the library is larger than the language. ML isn't even Julia's core target (it just happens to fits extremely well with numerical and s…

If my scenario holds, at some point Swift's scientific computing ecosystem will rival and overtake Julia's. I don't see the ML ecosystem developing in isolation because there's going to be overlap, especially as more and more code can be differentiated.

I mean, I can't really guess the future, but I kind of feel it's not a simple case of "if you build they'll come" here. Python has a dominance over ML (and over the academy in general) that is beyond any current language, but it didn't bring it's statistics ecosystem to the level of R (and statistics is much closer to ML than pure math and physics). That's because the ML ecosystem does work very well in isolation (it's mostly a black box regressor), and the natural path of evolution is not in different way of processing things, but ways of preprocessing things (for example, how to capture and treat images and sounds before applying the models).

And in this marathon Julia is a very late runner, and Swift didn't even start properly running in this direction.

Re: Julia 1.4

#70

Post by systemvoltage »

burntsushi wrote: post #68
systemvoltage wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The negativity is warranted if you've ever run Julia or had to maintain it in production. Use it for your own Jupyter notebooks and personal analysis? Great! Need to debug some weird obscure error (which Julia does a poor job of reporting to the user, let alone which line in the stack trace) while having production pressure to get it up and running again? Julia is unquestionably, unarguably and utterly unsuitable. Do…

Do you have any links to other material where I could read up on some of the problems folks have faced using Julia in production? Thanks!

I'd love to do a write up on the issues to guide the Julia team towards focusing on production and robustness, investing most of their efforts in a solid debugger support (Juno - totally incapable tool), and stopping all new features and "optimization" projects before getting these things sorted out. I am just too beaten, too bruised and injured to have the mental capacity to write an article. :( I am sorry if I am too harsh.
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