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Julia adoption keeps climbing

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Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#191

Post by Jugurtha »

enriquto wrote: post #182
Jugurtha wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My main point of friction with jupyter notebooks is the stupid json ipynb format. Why can't it be just a regular language file with comments? Have you ever used Jupyter notebooks? They contain code, rendered Markdown, images, plots, video players, widgets, etc. How do you see a "regular language file with comments" supporting this, instead of the "stupid ipynb format"? You can use plain text files with Jupyter, too…

> They contain code, rendered Markdown, images, plots, video players, widgets, etc. The code could be verbatim python code (or whatever language the notebook uses), and the rest could be embedded inside comments. I don't see any problem with that (besides the very concept of "rendered Markdown" being totally out of order). The fact that they are saving it as json by default seems more to be laziness by the developers…

>and the rest could be embedded inside comments. I don't see any problem with that

Do you mean embedding images and plots inside comments? If yes, please elaborate on how you see that happening in the real world.

>The fact that they are saving it as json by default seems more to be laziness by the developers than a well thought-out solution, that could be just a straightforward serializer.

So, how would that well thought-out solution in the form of a "straightforward serializer" work? I have a flat file, and I want to display images, plots that you can zoom into out of, figures, etc. as comments. How would that happen?

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#192

Post by jti107 »

"I saw the 87 percent increase and think it is wonderful to see Julia growing. I think that Julia has great potential to replace C/C++/Python (and of course Fortran) in scientific and technical computing as it matures."

its really all about the ecosystem, community and ease of use. python took off once people developed numpy, pandas, Anaconda, etc.

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#193

Post by BadInformatics »

ryndbfsrw wrote: post #157
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…

If we removed dplyr, then R scripts would absolutely scream so I find the speed argument for 'why switch to X' unconvincing. If users cared so deeply about speed, almost no one would be using tidyverse instead we'd all be using base-R or data.table. Multiple dispatch? Hmm is this really a problem that I'm going to come across in the real-world when 90% of our time is spent ingesting a poorly-formatted csv, doing some…

> is this really a problem that I'm going to come across in the real-world when 90% of our time is spent ingesting a poorly-formatted csv, doing some quick plots and perhaps building a model to test something out

Yes, multiple dispatch is not some highfalutin ivory tower concept that only comes up in specialized code. For example, the model in question could define custom plotting recipes[1] so that you can just call plot() and have it produce something useful.

Also, why shouldn't dplyr perform comparably against data.table? Seems like there would be no need for a fragmented library ecosystem here if the abstractions the tidyverse is built upon were lower-cost. Moreover, what if my data isn't CSV or in a table-like shape at all? "real world" does not mean the same thing across different domains.

[1] http://docs.juliaplots.org/latest/recipes/

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#194

Post by blablablerg »

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…

Coudn't agree more! Everytime I look at Julia, I check if they have an alternative to the tidyverse (esp. dplyr and tidyr) yet.

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#195

Post by oxinabox »

StefanKarpinski wrote: post #144
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 enthusias…

Trying to think of others.

Kotlin was 2011, and is JetBrains. JetBrain's is 1500 people. So big, but not giant.

Rust is 2013 Mozilla is only 750 people

So perhaps Major Tech Giant is over-stating it. But definately most other things in the last decade have a major established tech firm backing it.

Julia has basically nothing. Starting out as a MIT project, and then Julia Computing is a tiny startup; with like what 50 people now?

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#196

Post by physicsguy »

amkkma wrote: post #158
physicsguy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not overtaking at all. It's seen growth in some areas. The issue with regards to web programming/other programming is important, because sometimes it's useful to make a website/build another tool as a scientist. Python can do both easily.

So can Julia: https://github.com/plotly/Dash.jl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLhXgt_gKJc https://github.com/GenieFramework/Genie.jl

They're not exactly mature frameworks yet though, which is more the point I'm making. Of course, you can do most things in Julia, but does it provide a good experience for it yet?

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#197

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

oivey wrote: post #127
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I think that’s what I’m saying. When raising the issue that using multiple dispatch this way is premature abstraction that has intrinsic costs, all I get is the religious pamphlet about multiple dispatch.

In practice the multiple dispatch overhead is elided by the compiler. If it can’t be you’re doing something truly dynamic, which is generally unavoidably slower. It’s still a better place to be than everything being a generic Object type.

The nice thing about Cython is that you can have both - all the multiple dispatch you want with fused types, or escape that paradigm to do other things if you desire. It gives a lot of surgical control.

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#198

Post by enriquto »

Jugurtha wrote: post #191
enriquto wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They contain code, rendered Markdown, images, plots, video players, widgets, etc. The code could be verbatim python code (or whatever language the notebook uses), and the rest could be embedded inside comments. I don't see any problem with that (besides the very concept of "rendered Markdown" being totally out of order). The fact that they are saving it as json by default seems more to be laziness by the developers…

> and the rest could be embedded inside comments. I don't see any problem with that Do you mean embedding images and plots inside comments? If yes, please elaborate on how you see that happening in the real world. > The fact that they are saving it as json by default seems more to be laziness by the developers than a well thought-out solution, that could be just a straightforward serializer. So, how would that well t…

> How would that happen?

At the very least, you could put the whole json stuff inside a comment. It's already plain text, isn't it?

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#199

Post by jakobnissen »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #109

Is it correct to state that in 5 to 10 years we’ll see Julia as the default for new Data Science projects? (ML and statistical inference). I’m not a biggie on switching tool sets just because something is becoming “hot”. I like to start using something when it’s boring and battle tested, the youngsters can do the bleeding. But it seems like the likely candidate if something is going to displace the Python and R ecosy…

Probably yes - but 10 years is more likely than 5. Python really gained steam when it was 15+ years old. Julia has two years since its 1.0 release. But it will eventually take over Python, unless something third comes and takes the cake before it. Julia is simply much better: More consistent, better designed, faster, more flexible, more extendable and with better tooling.

But is say most people can just wait. If Python is working fine for you, and it's not going anywhere the next 10 years, why not just wait? At that point Julia will be more mature with better learning resources and a better ecosystem. You can always just pick it up then.

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#200

Post by alper111 »

phonebucket wrote: post #122

Julia offers a wonderful modular ecosystem. This is in no small part due to a clever design decision of language design of combining type genericism with multiple dispatch. For example, Turing.jl for Bayesian Inference plays well with Flux.jl for Neural Networks which plays well with DifferentialEquations.jl for ODEs. Basically, everything in pure Julia plays nicely with everything else. An example of how this useful…

This seems very desirable. Though at the moment, when the self-attention got popular for the first time, it was already available in PyTorch. Python seems to have the edge just because there are lots of people using it. Maybe it is just a matter of time and users. Probably I will wait until the ecosystem gets larger, and then switch to it. (Yes, I am a lazy person to implement a transformer from scratch)
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