Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Julia adoption keeps climbing

hpcwire.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 309 posts

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#91

Post by salt-licker »

Julia’s type system is not particularly user-friendly. For example, it has both a “String” and a “SubString” type which cannot always be interchanged. Their language design seem to be much more concerned with execution speed than programmer productivity — Python has the balance in the opposite direction, but they’ve been gradually improving performance for years, and this is much easier to improve after the language design is set in stone, especially as more and more people add typing info to their programs.

Also, 1-indexed arrays are a major turn-off.

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#92

Post by veddox »

amelius wrote: post #76

My gripes, feel free to disagree: 1. Julia uses base-1 indexing. 2. Julia uses an "end" keyword everywhere, which is imho too verbose (and the corresponding "begin" is missing so it's inconsistent).

I don't like those two either, but that doesn't change the fact that the rest of the language is absolutely ideal for what I do ;-) (ecosystem modelling)

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#93

Post by veddox »

qaq wrote: post #34

On what time scale? Julia is really nice lang. but it will take decades for it to put a serious dent in Python. If web side of things matures fast and someone builds a killer framework it might carve out a niche there too.

It's not meant for web, it's meant for scientific computing. And it has already left a mark on that field.

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#94

Post by dgb23 »

amelius wrote: post #76

My gripes, feel free to disagree: 1. Julia uses base-1 indexing. 2. Julia uses an "end" keyword everywhere, which is imho too verbose (and the corresponding "begin" is missing so it's inconsistent).

Disclaimer: Not a Julia user.

1. Base-1 indexing is more natural and less verbose. My suspicion is that base-0 indexing grew out of language implementers wanting to reduce their mental overhead rather than a first-principles approach. AKA machine code leaking out to the higher level languages.

2. You have to have some way of structuring syntax. Whether you have "end", ")" or "}". It is not inconsistent to start with something else, like a function signature with the corresponding keyword. Again Julia opts for natural readability.

Both of these complaints are rather superficial anyways. Julia is a marvelous piece of tech and has an interesting story to tell about type inference, multiple dispatch, performance, data-structures, general Lisp-yness and the merits of tailoring a language for a purpose/domain (and its users) in contrast to trying to adhere to paradigms and programmer culture (cults?).

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#95

Post by awefasdfasdf »

jpfr wrote: post #23

I teach a graduate course in optimization methods for machine learning and engineering [1,2]. Julia is just perfect for teaching numerical algorithms. First, it removes the typical numpy syntax boilerplate. Due to its conciseness, Julia has mostly replaced showing pseudo-code on my slides. It can be just as concise / readable; and on top the students immeditaly get the "real thing" they can plug into Jupyter notebook…

Small aside. Do you use the beamer package for your slides?

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#97

Post by chalst »

ptero wrote: post #37
superbcarrot wrote: post #4

Julia is a nice language, it's just tough to compete with Python. - The beginner experience in Julia is still much worse than it is in Python. Stuff that should work intuitively sometimes doesn't, and when you get a cryptic error message, it's difficult to find relevant help online. And when you do find help, some of it is out of date because the language has changed over the past few years. - You can squeeze a lot o…

I think your "ecosystem of python libraries" is the key point. Python got a lot of mileage for a mass adoption from ML. Its libraries provided an "easy ML" for masses at the time ML got popular in science and job market, which quickly brought it into mainstream and built up its network effect. A similar enabler in a new field could help Julia burst in as a general language. My 2c.

Autodiff is a place where there is a gulf between Julia and Python, one that I think can't be bridged well: JuliaDiff is astonishingly flexible and performant.

https://www.juliadiff.org/

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#98

Post by ku-man »

cricci16 wrote: post #8

In my modest experience the perfect Julia slogan would be: "fast as C, easy as python, but NEVER the two together" All the sentences: "When you’re writing various algorithms, you don’t necessarily want to think about whether you’re on a GPU, or whether you’re on a distributed computer. You don’t necessarily want to think about how you’ve implemented the specific data structure. What you want to do is talk about what…

This has been my experience as well. Julia's salespitch is somehow misleading. You would think those C-speeds like are there right of the bat when in reality you need lots of contortions and tricks to get them.

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#99

Post by veddox »

superbcarrot wrote: post #4

Julia is a nice language, it's just tough to compete with Python. - The beginner experience in Julia is still much worse than it is in Python. Stuff that should work intuitively sometimes doesn't, and when you get a cryptic error message, it's difficult to find relevant help online. And when you do find help, some of it is out of date because the language has changed over the past few years. - You can squeeze a lot o…

> Julia has to be way better than Python to give people an incentive to switch.

A language doesn't necessarily have to give all the old programmers an incentive to switch, if it can position itself as a good language for new programmers to learn.

For example: at our institute (computational biology), we had a PhD student who was an early Julia adopter and wrote his model in that. Several students have since joined the project he started, so obviously they're now writing Julia too. That project's experiences with the language were so good, it soon became obvious that for our use case, Julia was superior to any other language we'd used so far. So pretty much the whole research group has now shifted to Julia, and that's what we teach new students. Slowly, other groups in our institute became interested, and more and more people are adopting it, which in turn means that their new students will also end up learning it in future.

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#100

Post by tpoacher »

I don't want to disparage Julia, it's actually a very nice language, and I was very excited to learn it a couple of years ago.

But, honestly, I think their adoption at this point is less "linux-like" driven and much more "apple-like". In that, the language is 'ok', but the company is going to INCREDIBLE lengths with respect to shrewd marketing and buzz-creation at this point.

Which is admirable but also kinda worrying at the same time.

Post reply on HN