21–30 of 43 posts
This is a dumb question, but is Julia named after anyone in particular?
From an interview: InfoWold: Why the name, Julia? Karpinski: That's everybody's favorite question. There's no good reason, really. It just seemed like a pretty name. http://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/new-julia...
That said, I look forward to a future where Julia will take over many use cases that are served by Matlab right now.
Does anyone know what the state of plotting is in Julia? I couldn't really find any convincing examples for that. For many applications, plotting really is a big requirement. That said, I look forward to a future where Julia will take over many use cases that are served by Matlab right now.
http://julialang.org/downloads/
With the IPython Notebook and Julia, you can use Gadfly to produce plots right in the notebook without any further installation.
How suitable is it to use for mainstream programming (building web app, etc)
There is also a great interface to Python, giving you access to the wide range of its libraries.
How suitable is it to use for mainstream programming (building web app, etc)
For anyone interested in using Julia for numerical optimization/mathematical programming, see http://juliaopt.org/ . We have pure-Julia implementations of standard unconstrained methods [1] as well as a domain-specific modeling language [2] for (integer) linear programming with links to open-source and commercial solvers. Julia's performance and advanced language features such as metaprogramming really make it a grea…
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1FlHt245YxPXFwOHmxLYW...
How suitable is it to use for mainstream programming (building web app, etc)
That line of development hasn't been pushed very hard yet, but the fundamentals are good. For a example, check out http://iaindunning.com/2013/sudoku-as-a-service.html where I make a nice little webservice.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So if I understand it correctly, it's for efficiency? What about some special treatment by the compiler, is something like that possible?
Memory layout mostly. For example, a 10x10 64-bit floating-point matrix should be stored as contiguous chunk of 100 inline 64-bit floats. This is quite different than an array of arrays, which is represented as an array of pointers to separate boxed 1-d array objects. The contiguous layout is not only far more efficient, but also is what all numerical libraries like LAPACK and FFTW expect. If numerical arrays were no…
The standard lib and 3rd party libs use multi-d arrays, so I can't avoid them. But I guess it takes some time to get used to.
> I'm also not clear on what "special treatment by the compiler" means.
I meant something like saving an array of arrays into a continuous memory block and somehow enforcing that the sub-arrays must have equal length. But now I realize that this is probably impossible...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From an interview: InfoWold: Why the name, Julia? Karpinski: That's everybody's favorite question. There's no good reason, really. It just seemed like a pretty name. http://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/new-julia...
Really?? I was sure it was for Gaston Julia.
After using it for smaller projects, one of the few things I don't like is multidimensional arrays. I would prefer if only arrays of arrays were possible and had some syntax sugar. Edit: And perhaps some special treatment by the compiler for optimization. I find multi-d arrays counter-intuitive and clumsy on some situations. Also, currently I'm forced to write ugly code like array[x,y][i].
You can of course use arrays of arrays if you like, but multidimensional arrays are indispensable for numerical work, especially linear algebra – matrices are 2D arrays after all. When doing numerical work in C, for example, you have to simulate multidimensional arrays by doing your own index calculations to translate back and forth between linear indexing and N-d indexing. Having language support for this is a must…
If you have this code:
int a[10][10]; &a[x][y] == ((char *)a + x * sizeof(a[0]) + y * sizeof(a[0][0]))quick edit: added a (char *) cast so the arithmetic doesn't multiply by sizeof(int) again