Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Julia Programming Language

julialang.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 211 posts

Re: The Julia Programming Language

#191

Post by KingMob »

crntaylor wrote: post #179
StefanKarpinski wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using curly braces for blocking is a non-starter because they're used for a lot of other things, and honestly, bracket pairs like (), [], {} are way too precious, imo, to squander on something like blocks. Parens () are exclusively for function application; square brackets [] are exclusively for indexing operations; curly braces {} are for type parameterization. The other option that C++ popularized the use of is — b…

Matlab already allows you to omit the 'end' from function definitions, which many people find easier to read, and my experience seeing people transition from Matlab/Octave to Python+Numpy+Scipy is that people get on board with indentation-delimited blocks, because that's the way they write code anyway. But I agree - at the moment it's a pretty trivial thing. As a heavy user of Matlab, R and Py+N+S I'm looking forward…

I personally found it worse to read, because it makes function blocks different from other blocks. Also, if you define nested functions in Matlab, all functions in the file have to be closed with end anyway.

Nothing is as bad, though, as the default Matlab behavior of not indenting first-level function code. This makes it really hard to scan a file with multiple functions and see where they separate.

Re: The Julia Programming Language

#192

Post by warmfuzzykitten »

StefanKarpinski wrote: post #134
warmfuzzykitten wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like an easy fix.

Using curly braces for blocking is a non-starter because they're used for a lot of other things, and honestly, bracket pairs like (), [], {} are way too precious, imo, to squander on something like blocks. Parens () are exclusively for function application; square brackets [] are exclusively for indexing operations; curly braces {} are for type parameterization. The other option that C++ popularized the use of is — b…

I was referring specifically to supporting the Octave conventions, a superset of Matlab's, which make it easier to match up begins and ends.

When I said "easy fix" I meant "a trivial extension to the parser" without realizing you would translate that to "really low priority". Guess I'll save my non-trivial suggestions. :)

Re: The Julia Programming Language

#193

Post by warmfuzzykitten »

StefanKarpinski wrote: post #148
warmfuzzykitten wrote: post #99

When you try to install julia on MacOS X 10.7.3, you may see the make fail because wget is not installed. Easy to fix with: brew install wget [Edit] git page says gfortran (and wget) are downloaded and compiled, but if they're not already installed make fails. So... brew install gfortran The need to do this separately may have to do with licensing? [Edit] And if you're not root, install to /usr/share/julia will fail.…

Sorry! The only thing I can say in our defense is that this is pretty trivial compared to installing a lot of scientific computing packages. But seriously, we'd like a drag-and-drop Mac installer. Anyone want to do that? (Only half kidding.) Stepping back a bit, this is one of the reasons why having an entirely web-based experience is appealing — then you can let people use a known-good setup without needing to mess…

Please don't let perfection tomorrow keep you from meaningful improvements today. Just better instructions for Mac installs would be helpful!

Re: The Julia Programming Language

#194

Post by prtamil »

For analogy there are few original liquor (vodka,rum,Whiskey,Brandy,Wine etc..) but god damn so many cocktails, so many cocktails.

Same in Programming Language design. Few original concepts, Lisp,C,Smalltalk, but so many cocktails even my grandma is creating one. All we want is more libraries.

Re: The Julia Programming Language

#195

Post by Bromskloss »

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 .

Actually, the main reason I want to do away with Matlab and Octave is that I can't stand the 1-indexing! When voicing that opinion among collegues, I have heard no-one disagree with me. If you are actually stuck with this in Julia as well, I don't think I will have anything more to do with it.

Re: The Julia Programming Language

#196

Post by wan111 »

StefanKarpinski wrote: post #71
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 huge part of the goal here is to reduce the need for the "unholy mix of C, C++, fortran, matlab, octave, R and python routines" in both academic research work and machine learning / data science code in industrial settings. The whole project kicked off with me ranting about how I was sick of cobbling things together in six or seven different languages. So interop is a very, very high priority. We have pretty good C…

要让社会有大进步 ，这是必须 地

Re: The Julia Programming Language

#198

Post by MrMan »

I have made the same rants about numeric computing language issues as the Julia creators. I would avidly adopt Julia based on the documentation on the website. It seems to me that this is a beautifully conceived language given the concerns it attempts to address. Amazing even if the performance never improves.

The R thread on the dev list gives an accurate representation of the obstacles to Julia being widely adopted, however. One might become very unhappy while using R, but sometimes you have to use it, because something you want is only in R, due to the ubiquity of that tool for stats.

If Python, which does not have that many disadvantages besides not having been explicitly designed to appeal to users like me, cannot unseat Matlab and R, Julia will have a difficult time.

But I will give it a try, and will implement some simple but core algorithms that I use a lot.

Another idea to test Julia's usefulness would be to port a tool like Waffles to Julia. In my opinion implementing such a sensible tool like Waffles in C++ is a heartbreak.

Post reply on HN