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How an MIT research project became the Julia programming language

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

#81

Post by postflopclarity »

12jahsg wrote: post #70
ModernMech wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why AI is better at writing code than humans. They just write code and don’t complain about things that don’t matter, like indexing; or another classic, spaces vs tabs. Humans must learn to get past these things.

AI does not complain because it has no agency and cannot do anything without a prompt. It is better than your code, which is probably a low bar.

> It is better than your code, which is probably a low bar.

why so rude and adversarial, especially when so misinformed? AI code is better than 95% of engineers at this point.

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

#82

Post by cmontella »

guiriduro wrote: post #36
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.

I think this is true and agree. But also, the bar was pretty low before Julia, and since Julia it's been raised by languages like Futhark and Halide.

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

#83

Post by eigenspace »

defrost wrote: post #64
eigenspace wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You asked for a good argument - I provided one. I don't see a good argument though, I just see adaption to a quirky convention. > Either way of thinking works - I spent decades going back and forth from Fortran to C, and people are free to make their high level languages however they wish - it's trivial to move from one to the other. Here I agree. I have no real problem using a 0-based indexed language, I adapt to…

> , I just see adaption to a quirky convention. Of course you do - you very likely didn't start programming in assembler. You literally asked "How do I get to .." implying you wanting street instructions, distances, etc. In assembler the third element begins literally and straightforwardly at the address base plus two (element widths). That's not "a quirky adaption" is it? It's a dull pragmatic address of the start o…

I did not say "How do I get *to* ..".

> Of course you do - you very likely didn't start programming in assembler.

I did not, and I do not think that conventions from assembler should influence basic ergnonomic design decisions of modern high-level langauges.

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

#84

Post by erjaq17 »

postflopclarity wrote: post #81
12jahsg wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI does not complain because it has no agency and cannot do anything without a prompt. It is better than your code, which is probably a low bar.

> It is better than your code, which is probably a low bar. why so rude and adversarial, especially when so misinformed? AI code is better than 95% of engineers at this point.

It is better than your code for sure. 95% confirmed by Netcraft and Gartner.

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

#85

Post by aqme28 »

eigenspace wrote: post #49

Julia is such a great language, it's what really made me care about end enjoy programming. I think it's the modern language which has taken the most lessons from lisps, and has come up with some great ideas of its own too. There's lots to like, but I think the thing I love most about it and find it so interesting is that it's almost uniquely good at taking a piece of code and transforming it's meaning in various ways…

I love multiple dispatch and I wish more languages had it

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

#86

Post by [deleted] »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #46
Someone wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Julia is the first language I've seen in years that implicitly abstracts parallelism cleanly. What do you mean by “implicitly”? A single dot is short but not implicit. I also do not see https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/parallel-computing/ s mention that such map calls (can) run on multiple threads.

The abstraction does not require a lot of understanding/bodges to get performant code by amateurs: https://cuda.juliagpu.org/stable/tutorials/introduction/ But I agree the shared memory Distributed Computing part of Julia still needs a lot of work. Spawning binary image instances over ssh is too fragile. =3

[deleted]

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

#87

Post by postflopclarity »

erjaq17 wrote: post #84
postflopclarity wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is better than your code, which is probably a low bar. why so rude and adversarial, especially when so misinformed? AI code is better than 95% of engineers at this point.

It is better than your code for sure. 95% confirmed by Netcraft and Gartner.

why do you keep making new accounts?

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

#88

Post by eigenspace »

aqme28 wrote: post #85
eigenspace wrote: post #49

Julia is such a great language, it's what really made me care about end enjoy programming. I think it's the modern language which has taken the most lessons from lisps, and has come up with some great ideas of its own too. There's lots to like, but I think the thing I love most about it and find it so interesting is that it's almost uniquely good at taking a piece of code and transforming it's meaning in various ways…

I love multiple dispatch and I wish more languages had it

It's a really nice feature. That said, I do think in the earlier days, the community did get a bit too enthusiastic about it, and used it in a lot of places in the ecosystem that didn't make so much sense.

I think things have come down to a much more reasonable place though now.

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

#89

Post by retsibsi »

postflopclarity wrote: post #31
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.

I'm one of today's lucky 10,000, so I'm glad it was linked here (and would happily read a defence of the language from one of those previous discussions, too).

When the criticisms relate to correctness bugs, I don't think 'try it out and see how you like it' is sufficient. I might love the syntax and the design and so on, but that doesn't tell me whether I'm going to run into serious bugs some time in the future.

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

#90

Post by patagurbon »

postflopclarity wrote: post #78
lalalanananana wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly recommend listening to others experiences and not forwarding some conversion metric for the languages share holders. Maybe there's a lot of wisdom in smart people being vocal enough to say "yea no" about it. It's not like it's one person...

I don't have any financial interest in Julia so I'm a bit confused about the reference to "share holders." I'm just a user. I'm sure there are lots of smart people who found that the language didn't suit their needs. there are also lots of smart people who love using Julia. both things can be true at the same time.

There are no language share holders, and note that this account was created an hour ago just to post vague nonspecific gripes about Julia.

There are some real issues in the ecosystem. Specifically there is a high proportion of “gradware” because much like other scientific languages there is a high proportion of graduate students doing their projects and then moving on.

The language also encourages relying on packages which can break. But juliaup makes this easy enough to solve by downgrading.

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