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How an MIT research project became the Julia programming language

news.mit.edu

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Re: How an MIT research project became the Julia programming language

#31

Post by postflopclarity »

radiator wrote: post #30

Do you think the criticism in the article "Why I no longer recommend Julia" about correctness is still valid? * there are too many correctness and composability bugs throughout the ecosystem to justify using it in just about any context where correctness matters * https://yuri.is/not-julia/

I think that article has been discussed to death and there's not much value in resurrecting it on every single post that mentions Julia. ultimately if you think the language might be a fit for your use case, I'd recommend trying it out and see how you like it first-hand.

Re: How an MIT research project became the Julia programming language

#32

Post by jhbadger »

jhoechtl wrote: post #21
muragekibicho wrote: post #4

Julia uses 1-based indexing. It's competes with R and Matlab for the same set of users. Both R and Julia have their core functions written in C++. Absolutely nothing new. From my experience, grad students use Julia when their PI thinks a new programming language will help differentiate their next NSF proposal among vast funding requests.

> Julia uses 1-based indexing. That rules it out to become a successor to Python. It sounds reasonable until you start interacting with other libraries. I do know the attemp to justify it for Lua and I don't buy it.

Nearly all languages designed for mathematics are 1-based - R, Matlab, Mathematica, etc. because that's the mathematical convention and allows using formulas directly. The fact that Python isn't is a drawback in the domain.

Re: How an MIT research project became the Julia programming language

#33

Post by yurivish »

radiator wrote: post #30

Do you think the criticism in the article "Why I no longer recommend Julia" about correctness is still valid? * there are too many correctness and composability bugs throughout the ecosystem to justify using it in just about any context where correctness matters * https://yuri.is/not-julia/

I do. It pairs nicely with this quote from the article:

> “With Dyad 3.0, you can upload data and design documents and the system will design an entire aircraft for you,” Shah says

Re: How an MIT research project became the Julia programming language

#34

Post by dandanua »

The Julia type system is also great for AI, it makes code generation more robust. I also liked that some Julia code (such as matrix multiplication) can be executed on a GPU with no change and will be almost as fast as possible, although complex algorithms still require writing specialized kernels (which can be done completely in Julia as well).

Re: How an MIT research project became the Julia programming language

#35

Post by jampekka »

maxall4 wrote: post #2

I really want to like Julia. It has a nice type system, a good ecosystem, reasonable syntax, and it’s far faster than Python. But there are several issues with its DX that prevent me from using it: the most severe of which being the complete lack of a cache for the JIT (or JIT like system), inducing multi second compile times for scripts that run in (I last tried Julia a few years ago; perhaps this has been improved…

Also the module/import system is still quite painful/hacky. Which is partly due to the long compile times.

https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1.13-dev/manual/workflow-tips...

Re: How an MIT research project became the Julia programming language

#36

Post by guiriduro »

prof-dr-ir wrote: post #24

Julia is fantastic if you do numerical work and want to write out your inner loops explicitly without sacrificing too much performance, either for pedagogical reasons or because you want to fiddle with the algorithm. It is a lot of fun to start from an empty file, add maybe an import LinearAlgebra, and develop things like a convolutional neural network or a Markov-chain Monte Carlo algorithm completely from scratch.…

Julia also has some of the nicest GPU abstraction frameworks of any language, achieving pretty low friction portability over a decent subset of CUDA, Metal, ROCm and CPU. KernelAbstractions.jl, AcceleratedKernels.jl etc.

Re: How an MIT research project became the Julia programming language

#37

Post by drhagen »

When I was a grad student at MIT, my desk was across the hall from the Julia people. We even shared a lunch table. Julia is most famous for its optimizing compiler, but many people may not notice the careful work that went into designing the language itself. Matlab this was not! I remember one long conversation where one of them was teaching me about the different types of normalization of unicode. They had to pick one to canonicalize unicode variable names (more useful for a mathy programming language), and they were carefully considering the consequences of the options.

Re: How an MIT research project became the Julia programming language

#38

Post by Staross »

prof-dr-ir wrote: post #24

Julia is fantastic if you do numerical work and want to write out your inner loops explicitly without sacrificing too much performance, either for pedagogical reasons or because you want to fiddle with the algorithm. It is a lot of fun to start from an empty file, add maybe an import LinearAlgebra, and develop things like a convolutional neural network or a Markov-chain Monte Carlo algorithm completely from scratch.…

And if you don't want to code your own HMM it also has the best (AFAIK) HMM library out there (HiddenMarkovModels.jl).

Re: How an MIT research project became the Julia programming language

#39

Post by ainch »

radiator wrote: post #30

Do you think the criticism in the article "Why I no longer recommend Julia" about correctness is still valid? * there are too many correctness and composability bugs throughout the ecosystem to justify using it in just about any context where correctness matters * https://yuri.is/not-julia/

As someone who could be tempted by Julia but isn't involved in the community this was a very helpful read, thank you for sharing.

Re: How an MIT research project became the Julia programming language

#40

Post by ModernMech »

slwvx wrote: post #14
bretnach wrote: post #13

Yet another example of MIT taking far too much credit for something...

I've seen JuliaHub taking credit for all of Julia before. I don't think there's anything new in this article

It’s a stealth ad for Dyad.
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