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Julia adoption keeps climbing

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Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#141

Post by CoolGuySteve »

laplacesdemon48 wrote: post #125

I've been using R nonstop for pretty much 5+ years. I'm happy that there's established competition coming from Python and new competition coming from Julia. Having these languages compete over similar types of programmers pushes each one to be better, which is awesome. I'm not a die-hard R person, I'd be more than happy to switch under the right circumstances. But...I think one thing gets overlooked way too often. Fo…

When it comes to data wrangling, one huge advantage of Julia over tidyverse/R dataframes/Pandas is that you can write a damn for loop and it won't be brutally slow.

It's so much simpler and faster to use a loop that says "pick this row only if this and that and this other thing are sometimes true" vs having to construct an algebra of column filters to do the same.

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#142

Post by eigenspace »

tpoacher wrote: post #100

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 worryin…

Very little Julia hype comes from JuliaComputing.

The buzz you see is almost all from people who switched from other languages and found that Julia was a gigantic breath of fresh air. I can say that for me, it completely changed my attitude towards programming in general. Before, programming was something I did sometimes as part of my physics research. Now, it’s also my hobby that I probably spend too much time on.

It’s hard not to get a little evangelical when you go through a change like this.

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#143

Post by CoolGuySteve »

veddox wrote: post #99
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 And when you do find help, some of it is out of date because the language has changed over the past few years.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 th…

If you work with a lot of data, Julia is already a 10-100x improvement over Python.

Being able to iterate and mangle huge columns with real lambdas and without having to marshal arguments to/from C++ is a huge advantage.

Where I used to spend hours in aggregate searching through docs for pandas/numpy, for stupid shit like "how do I shift but also skip NaNs", now I just write a for-loop in a couple minutes and get on with my work.

There's a whole subclass of tasks in R/pandas to work around the interpreter that just aren't needed in Julia.

For me at least it's well worth the syntactical warts and slow interpreter.

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#144

Post by StefanKarpinski »

tpoacher wrote: post #100

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 worryin…

This "Julia marketing conspiracy theory" that many people on HN seem to believe is so bizarre. What big tech company do you think is behind this incredible, shrewd and presumably well-funded marketing campaign? Julia is the only new major programming language of the last decade that doesn't have a major tech giant backing it. Adoption and development are pretty much entirely grass roots. If you see a lot of enthusiastic posts about Julia on HN, that's because there are a lot of actual people out there using Julia who love it and write posts about it.

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#145

Post by pjmlp »

pansa2 wrote: post #49
oefrha wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t have much insight on the scientific computing landscape in general, but here’s one notable data point: I worked on the CMS experiment of LHC (Large Hadron Collider) for a while, which is one of the highest profile experiments in experimental physics. The majority of CMS code is C++, which you can check for yourself at https://github.com/cms-sw/cmssw (yes, much/most? of the code is open source). What I worked…

> prototyped in Python, then ported to C++ This need to rewrite, of course, is what Julia is trying to avoid. My workflow is exactly the same, and I’d love to be able to write code in a high-level language like Python and then use that directly instead of having to rewrite. However, in my case the reason for rewriting isn’t just performance, but also to be able to build compiled binaries. Julia aims to be as high-lev…

> is there a language that’s as high-level as Python but AOT-compiled?

Common Lisp, Ocaml for example.

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#147

Post by oblio »

veddox wrote: post #99
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 th…

Examples: Basic, C (both Basic and C, to a degree), Visual Basic, PHP, Javascript, Python. I'm probably missing some. These displaced older languages just by being adopted by newbies.

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#148

Post by pjmlp »

jpsamaroo wrote: post #71
sgt101 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For GUI's I don't see this as an issue - JITs run alot faster than humans. All of Javascript is on a JIT - and thats the dominant UI for now! For servers generally you find that users are all calling the same function so it's very rare that you hit a blip - much more commonly users get performance problems from something else in the stack like the network or the client, and while Javascript is the dominant front end…

JavaScript's JIT is a tracing JIT, so it can compile code in the background while the interpreter/less optimized compiled code is actually running. In Julia, the compiler runs first, and then the compiled code is run. This will probably eventually change as Julia's compiler improves, but regardless, it's important to note this distinction.

It can make use of JIT caches (if it doesn't already), not every JIT compiler starts from zero.

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#149

Post by laplacesdemon48 »

j7ake wrote: post #137
laplacesdemon48 wrote: post #125

I've been using R nonstop for pretty much 5+ years. I'm happy that there's established competition coming from Python and new competition coming from Julia. Having these languages compete over similar types of programmers pushes each one to be better, which is awesome. I'm not a die-hard R person, I'd be more than happy to switch under the right circumstances. But...I think one thing gets overlooked way too often. Fo…

Another big thing that R has an edge over python (and I guess Julia, but not sure) is making quick yet presentable plots of data that contain different factors that you want to show together. The matplotlib equivalent requires tracking different indices and manually adding layers for different indices.

Here's a neat website that captures this: https://www.r-graph-gallery.com/

If you click into any of the plots and scroll down you can see how little code is needed for most of these plots.

For example: https://www.r-graph-gallery.com/135-stacked-density-graph.ht...

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#150

Post by [deleted] »

laplacesdemon48 wrote: post #125

I've been using R nonstop for pretty much 5+ years. I'm happy that there's established competition coming from Python and new competition coming from Julia. Having these languages compete over similar types of programmers pushes each one to be better, which is awesome. I'm not a die-hard R person, I'd be more than happy to switch under the right circumstances. But...I think one thing gets overlooked way too often. Fo…

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