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Julia 1.6: what has changed since Julia 1.0?

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Re: Julia 1.6: what has changed since Julia 1.0?

#41

Post by cmeacham98 »

oblio wrote: post #15
klmadfejno wrote: post #3

> People often complain about the “Time To First Plot” (TTFP) in Julia. I personally have never minded it – by the time I am plotting something, I have done minutes of thinking so 20 seconds of compilation is nothing. This amuses me. I hadn't really considered the author's perspective, and now I think it aligns with my take on it pretty well.

That won't stop these people. It's the same discussion as the interpreted languages vs compiled languages or the editor flame wars. On one hand you have people that say "thinking takes a lot longer than waiting a bit for compilation or actually editing source code" (I'm in this camp) and people that go "I don't want to wait for compilation and I want my editing to be hyper-efficient even if I have to invest hundreds…

You seem to be falling into the same trap you lament in your comment:

- The other side is "these people" that "won't stop"

- They're striving for "hyper-efficiency" at the cost of "hundreds and thousands of hours"

- People who complain about this issue don't (or do significantly less of) reading documentation/code/etc

People talk about TTFP because it is a real issue that is off-putting for many programmers that would otherwise love to use Julia. Julia is roughly an order of magnitude slower than python in this instance on my computer, and that's not a good first impression.

That doesn't mean that everyone is going to be impacted by this issue (obvious ex: you aren't), but this isn't akin to a flamewar because unlike editor choice (which is opinion), Julia would be better for everyone if TTFP was improved. Whether or not it should be prioritized as a development goal is up to the Julia team, but it's not just some difference of opinion like interpreted vs compiled or functional vs OO.

Re: Julia 1.6: what has changed since Julia 1.0?

#42

Post by cbkeller »

nextos wrote: post #13
swagonomixxx wrote: post #11

As someone who knows very little but wants to learn: what's the best way to get up and running with Julia? On the website, they link a lot of videos, but I prefer textual formats. Is there something like the Rust Book for Julia?

The official manual is very good, and reads more or less like a textbook: https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/

Yeah, this is probably actually the closest equivalent to the Rust Book, but I’ll also second the suggestion from the other comment of “Think Julia” (beginner) and “Design Patterns and Best Practices with Julia” (intermediate /advanced).

For me, the most important thing to grasp when coming from another language was that Julia’s multiple dispatch brings with it effectively a whole paradigm of “dispatch-centric programming” that you have to embrace to really get the most out of Julia, including the c-like speed (have to strictly avoid type-instability for that) and the composability that everyone talks about.

Re: Julia 1.6: what has changed since Julia 1.0?

#43

Post by dnautics »

oblio wrote: post #15
klmadfejno wrote: post #3

> People often complain about the “Time To First Plot” (TTFP) in Julia. I personally have never minded it – by the time I am plotting something, I have done minutes of thinking so 20 seconds of compilation is nothing. This amuses me. I hadn't really considered the author's perspective, and now I think it aligns with my take on it pretty well.

That won't stop these people. It's the same discussion as the interpreted languages vs compiled languages or the editor flame wars. On one hand you have people that say "thinking takes a lot longer than waiting a bit for compilation or actually editing source code" (I'm in this camp) and people that go "I don't want to wait for compilation and I want my editing to be hyper-efficient even if I have to invest hundreds…

> People are just different but every camp thinks They're Right and The Others Are Dumb and Stupid And Dangerous.

That's not quite right, I think. People are looking for excuses to not use Julia (r new technology X) because it serves as confirmation bias that their choice of is still good and there is no need to start thinking of their extensive training and investment in blub is sunk.

Re: Julia 1.6: what has changed since Julia 1.0?

#44

Post by wodenokoto »

baldfat wrote: post #29
phillc73 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried Query.jl or DataFramesMeta.jl?

I don't like working with DATA TABLES UNLESS it is a HUGE data frames. Then if it is huge I'll go towards sparks. I normally am working with under a million objects which with today's computers is not that big. Edit I meant to say that DATA TABLES library in R reminds me more of Query.jl then tiddyverse

What are you doing in the tidyverse that is not related to dataframes (or tibbles as the subclass of data.frame, that tidyverse uses is called)?

Re: Julia 1.6: what has changed since Julia 1.0?

#45

Post by eigenspace »

systemvoltage wrote: post #40
oscardssmith wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a better time to first plot than matlab, which is one of the other major contenders. On my computer it is about 3 seconds, which is noticable, but far from disqualifing.

Julia oversells itself as a general purpose language which I find absolutely out of line. Their marketing needs to be a lot more humble until they figure out the kinks. Also, my guess would be Python and not Matlab as it’s main competitors.

In what way is marketing julia as a general purpose programming language 'way out of line'?

People use julia to make webservers, write programming languages, create plotting libraries, do scientific analysis, do compiler research, make video games, do HPC, etc.

Julia has a design that's indeed strongly informed by scientific computing, but in order to actually meet the needs of the various people using it for scientific and technical purposes, it ended up needing to become a flexible enough language to be useful for anything.

Re: Julia 1.6: what has changed since Julia 1.0?

#46

Post by DNF2 »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #41
oblio wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That won't stop these people. It's the same discussion as the interpreted languages vs compiled languages or the editor flame wars. On one hand you have people that say "thinking takes a lot longer than waiting a bit for compilation or actually editing source code" (I'm in this camp) and people that go "I don't want to wait for compilation and I want my editing to be hyper-efficient even if I have to invest hundreds…

You seem to be falling into the same trap you lament in your comment: - The other side is "these people" that "won't stop" - They're striving for "hyper-efficiency" at the cost of "hundreds and thousands of hours" - People who complain about this issue don't (or do significantly less of) reading documentation/code/etc People talk about TTFP because it is a real issue that is off-putting for many programmers that woul…

I cannot fathom how ttfp is important. It's time to first plot, not to every plot. After it's down to ~10 seconds, why on earth does anyone care?

Re: Julia 1.6: what has changed since Julia 1.0?

#47

Post by dm3 »

simias wrote: post #37
oblio wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That won't stop these people. It's the same discussion as the interpreted languages vs compiled languages or the editor flame wars. On one hand you have people that say "thinking takes a lot longer than waiting a bit for compilation or actually editing source code" (I'm in this camp) and people that go "I don't want to wait for compilation and I want my editing to be hyper-efficient even if I have to invest hundreds…

I don't know how Julia fares but personally what bothers me with long compile times is when I can't context switch, waiting for the compiler's output. What I mean in practice is that if you take Rust for instance, the compile times can be fairly long but the type checking occurs early on and is quite fast. Therefore once I know that this step succeeded I can usually let the compilation continue in the background whil…

That's right. However, the 20s delay only happens once during the first plot action in the fresh REPL. That's when Julia compiles all of the functions not present in the system image. All of the repeated plotting will not require recompilation of the "base" plotting libraries.

Re: Julia 1.6: what has changed since Julia 1.0?

#48

Post by enriquto »

rightbyte wrote: post #27
cambalache wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What boggles my mind is that a language oriented to scientific programming has such a lousy time to first plot. I know it has been improving, it is still not acceptable. Not for me as a user, not acceptable for a language who wants to become mainstream.

The plot is also very simple. No zoom, brush, save to file, label, title, regression etc that you need to process it in a GUI and save for a report. I would really like to use Julia as a "Matlab or Octave but with nice string concatenation" but the UI is just lacking for one off calculations and data processing.

> Octave but with nice string concatenation

As a heavy octave user, I never felt a need to concatenate strings in any way. But I'd be happy if julia was an Octave but with fast loops, which it sort of is; but still not really there.

Re: Julia 1.6: what has changed since Julia 1.0?

#49

Post by dTal »

saiojd wrote: post #26
Sukera wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most important part about the releases since 1.0 is that compile time has been significantly reduced, the article touches on basically all ways how this has been done - may I ask when you've last tried it?

A few months ago. First time to plot is noticeably better than it was a few versions ago, but still extremely slow compared to Python. The article gives a benchmark of 9 seconds. I mean, come on. The main problem I had was simply that what any time I needed to modify a struct field, or anytime my program crashed, or any time the buggy IDE extension crashed, I needed to recompile everything. I also haven't found anyon…

> The "just ahed of time" compilation is one of those obvious-in-hindsight ideas IMO

It's not new. One of the most widely used Lisp environments, SBCL, works this way. So does Chez Scheme, and therefore now Racket.

Re: Julia 1.6: what has changed since Julia 1.0?

#50

Post by DNF2 »

simias wrote: post #37
oblio wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That won't stop these people. It's the same discussion as the interpreted languages vs compiled languages or the editor flame wars. On one hand you have people that say "thinking takes a lot longer than waiting a bit for compilation or actually editing source code" (I'm in this camp) and people that go "I don't want to wait for compilation and I want my editing to be hyper-efficient even if I have to invest hundreds…

I don't know how Julia fares but personally what bothers me with long compile times is when I can't context switch, waiting for the compiler's output. What I mean in practice is that if you take Rust for instance, the compile times can be fairly long but the type checking occurs early on and is quite fast. Therefore once I know that this step succeeded I can usually let the compilation continue in the background whil…

If it were 20 seconds for every plot, this would be a major problem for me, as I tend to make lots of plots. But it's only the first plot where this is an issue. Surely you're not in 'the zone' that soon?

Seems to me like people are making a mountain out of a molehill.

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