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Julia adoption keeps climbing

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Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#221

Julia is fantastic with a great community. The one issue I have though is the use of greek symbols, while great for those formally trained, may have a negative impact on wider adoption for deep learning.

I don't think Julia requires you to Greek symbols, rather it allows them ;-)

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#222
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then Julia should stop describing itself as a general-purpose programming language.

Julia absolutely is a general purpose language and has been from the beginning. However, there are plenty of languages that are fine for building websites, whereas there are no other languages with the combination of speed and usability that Julia offers in technical computing. It's a lovely language for doing all kinds of work and I personally mostly use it for non-technical computing these days — specifically to im…

As any mother will tell you, your own baby is the cutest baby the world has ever seen.

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#223
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…

I'm using Julia (because of the hype) to prototype out some numerical optimization stuff. There is a million functions for reshaping multidimensional arrays. The syntax is uncannily like Matlab: retrieving the last element of an array with `[end]`, indexing into a collection with an array of booleans, element-wise versions of operators prepended with dot, etc. However, I keep running into niggling corner cases that k…

For the last thing, is this what you want? https://github.com/JuliaArrays/PaddedViews.jl

There may be other packages or methods for doing the other things you want. I’d think that broadcasting over a NamedTuple would iterate over the key => value pairs, but I haven’t tried it.

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Julia Computing is about 40 people, and that is a recent thing.

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#225
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember in ~2005 people said almost the exact same thing about Python and Perl.

I think you are confusing 1995 with 2005. Perl was in decline by 2000 and by 2005 it was terminal; you could probably count the number of perl shops of any consequence in that year on the fingers of one hand.

I don't think that is the case. Sure Perl may have been in decline for ages, but people were not comparing Perl to Python for that long. Simply because python hasn't existed that long.

Python 2.0 was released in 2000. Python 1.0 was 1994, and Python 0.9 (first public release?) was 1991.

Check the google trends. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=p... Its unclear when perl peaked since it has been in decline since before 2004 But it wasn't til late 2007 that Python overtook Perl in google searches

Even while it was in decline people were still making that argument.

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#226
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…

I'm using Julia (because of the hype) to prototype out some numerical optimization stuff. There is a million functions for reshaping multidimensional arrays. The syntax is uncannily like Matlab: retrieving the last element of an array with `[end]`, indexing into a collection with an array of booleans, element-wise versions of operators prepended with dot, etc. However, I keep running into niggling corner cases that k…

It's not generally recommended but you can do a custom getproperty() for Tuple.

  julia> function Base.getproperty(x::Tuple, f::Symbol)
       if f == :a
         return x[1]
       elseif f == :b
         return x[2]
       else
         return x[3]
       end
       end

  julia> (3,4,5).a
  3
Edit: Okay, why am I getting randomly downvoted here?

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#227
post #93
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.

It's easy to pick up super readable performant lang with good package manager. This already makes it significantly better than a good number of popular web dev. languages.

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#228
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Urg that website is so incredibly out of date. Julia has amazing things for autodiff. But like not the things listed on that website. Also python is still doing great with Jax and PyTorch.

I linked to the website (which was updated in May, but its contents could do with more work) because it has examples of how well the suite fits together.

I don't know much about Jax. I've seen competent benchmarks showing an order of magnitude benefit for using ReverseDiff from the AutoDiff suite over Autograd, which is what Pytorch uses for reverse-mode autodiff

Re: Julia adoption keeps climbing

#229
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also like pipe syntax and I've found there is nice support for it in Julia. There are some nice packages to improve it over base [1]. Have you checked queryverse [2]? [1] https://github.com/jkrumbiegel/Chain.jl [2] https://www.queryverse.org

I haven't heard of queryverse, thank you for that. This also brings up a good point I wanted to highlight. I get that Julia is a young language with a growing ecosystem. But the lack of "one obvious way to do something" may scare new users away. "I want to quickly wrangle data. Do I use Query.jl, DataFramesMeta.jl, SplitApplyCombine.jl or something else?" "I need pipes to help me wrangle data more efficiently do I us…

> For a new R user it seems so much simpler:

> 1. run "library(dplyr)" 2. Google "how to XYZ in dplyr" 3. ??? 4. Profit

I beg to differ here. There’s much to be said for using data.table and base R instead of the tidyverse.

This article is worth a read in my view: https://github.com/matloff/TidyverseSkeptic

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