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The Julia Programming Language

julialang.org

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Re: The Julia Programming Language

#61

Post by TheoLib »

ludwigvan wrote: post #29
wbhart wrote: post #28

Much praise!! These guys have incredibly good taste. Almost every single thing I can think of that I want in a programming language, they have it. All in the one language! The fact that it has parametric types, parametric polymorphism, macros, performance almost as good as C, good C/Fortran interop, 64 bit integers and an interactive REPL all in the one language just blows my mind. I wasn't able to tell if it is poss…

I think they are aiming for smooth transition for MATLAB users. They also have 1-index based arrays as opposed to 0-index .

A number of programming languages allow an arbitrary range of indices for an array, including Ada, Fortran 77, and Pascal. See the "Specifiable Base Index" column in this table at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_langu...

Re: The Julia Programming Language

#62

Post by joelthelion »

fijal wrote: post #39
mjw wrote: post #26

I wonder what they think about or have learned from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_(programming_language) , another recent-ish attempt to deliver a modern and powerful scientific programming language. Personally I'm a little wary of being ghettoised into something overly domain-specific for scientific/numerical computing. Really good interop may mitigate that -- something which can navigate the unholy mix of C…

Python+numpy+scipy does work only if you actually don't write much python or at least not run much python. Otherwise it sucks

Just wait for Numpy on PyPy to be available :)

Re: The Julia Programming Language

#64

Post by StefanKarpinski »

wbhart wrote: post #28

Much praise!! These guys have incredibly good taste. Almost every single thing I can think of that I want in a programming language, they have it. All in the one language! The fact that it has parametric types, parametric polymorphism, macros, performance almost as good as C, good C/Fortran interop, 64 bit integers and an interactive REPL all in the one language just blows my mind. I wasn't able to tell if it is poss…

Thanks for the incredibly high praise. It definitely is possible to overload operators — operators are just functions with special syntax (see http://julialang.org/manual/functions/#Operators+Are+Functio...). We don't have bignum support, but adding it via GMP would be fairly easy. Just too many things to do!

Re: The Julia Programming Language

#65

Post by StefanKarpinski »

_delirium wrote: post #49
mkl wrote: post #47

The language looks interesting, but I am a bit concerned about the license situation, as in my understanding they have misinterpreted the GPL with regard to shared libraries. Quoting: Various libraries used by the Julia environment include their own licenses such as the GPL, LGPL, and BSD (therefore the environment, which consists of the language, user interfaces, and libraries, is under the GPL). Core functionality…

I believe what they're saying is that there are two things: 1. The Julia core, which consists of the language runtime and core functionality, is MIT licensed, and builds into an MIT-licensed shared library. 2. The Julia "environment", which includes a user interface, third-party libraries, etc., some of which are GPL, and which is therefore GPL as a whole. I believe they're saying that you can link #1 with proprietar…

That is exactly right. At the moment I think the only GPL library Julia uses is readline — but obviously that's pretty important for the repl, so we chose to do it this way.

Re: The Julia Programming Language

#66

Post by FraaJad »

joelthelion wrote: post #62
fijal wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python+numpy+scipy does work only if you actually don't write much python or at least not run much python. Otherwise it sucks

Just wait for Numpy on PyPy to be available :)

Do you realise you are talking to a PyPy core dev? ;)

Re: The Julia Programming Language

#67

Post by StefanKarpinski »

pron wrote: post #48
mjw wrote: post #26

I wonder what they think about or have learned from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_(programming_language) , another recent-ish attempt to deliver a modern and powerful scientific programming language. Personally I'm a little wary of being ghettoised into something overly domain-specific for scientific/numerical computing. Really good interop may mitigate that -- something which can navigate the unholy mix of C…

I've been waiting for Fortress for a LONG time, but either progress has been real slow or the Fortress team has trouble communicating their progress to the community. Probably both. From a quick look I can tell that while Fortress is more similar to Scala, with classes, mixins and static typing, Julia is closer to Clojure, with no encapsulation, dynamic typing, homoiconicity, and separation of behavior (methods) from…

Yeah, we've been waiting for a while for Fortress too. It seems like a lot of time and effort has gone into a WYSIWYG IDE and not as much into the actual language implementation :-(

Chapel has made a lot of progress in the past 2.5 years (while we've been working on Julia) and is certainly a contender.

Julia certainly aims to be more dynamic like Clojure, but specially designed to be good for numerical and technical stuff, and yes, the begin/end is due to Matlab — scientists who have a lot of code in Matlab already are a major target demographic. As it is, a lot of Matlab code ports over with relatively trivial changes (see: http://julialang.org/manual/getting-started/#Major+Differenc...), which was the point of syntactic similarity to Matlab.

Re: The Julia Programming Language

#68

Post by gtani »

pron wrote: post #48
mjw wrote: post #26

I wonder what they think about or have learned from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_(programming_language) , another recent-ish attempt to deliver a modern and powerful scientific programming language. Personally I'm a little wary of being ghettoised into something overly domain-specific for scientific/numerical computing. Really good interop may mitigate that -- something which can navigate the unholy mix of C…

I've been waiting for Fortress for a LONG time, but either progress has been real slow or the Fortress team has trouble communicating their progress to the community. Probably both. From a quick look I can tell that while Fortress is more similar to Scala, with classes, mixins and static typing, Julia is closer to Clojure, with no encapsulation, dynamic typing, homoiconicity, and separation of behavior (methods) from…

I think i've been waiting for Chapel more than X10 or Fortress, but scala and clojure are assuming the mantles as general purpose languages.

http://bartoszmilewski.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/supercomputi...

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4405

Re: The Julia Programming Language

#69

Post by jfager »

ced wrote: post #51
jfager wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matlab, Octave, Mathematica, and other mathematical programming environments use 1-based indexing, it's a well-established norm for the domain.

Does 1-based indexing have any advantage, beyond familiarity to scientists?

Not really, but it's not important either way.

Re: The Julia Programming Language

#70

Post by jballanc »

ced wrote: post #51
jfager wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matlab, Octave, Mathematica, and other mathematical programming environments use 1-based indexing, it's a well-established norm for the domain.

Does 1-based indexing have any advantage, beyond familiarity to scientists?

With 1-based indexing, length == last index.

Does 0-based indexing have any advantage, beyond ability to do pointer arithmetic with indexes?

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