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Why I'm Betting On Julia

evanmiller.org

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Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#11

Post by untog »

tieTYT wrote: post #3

> my two concerns are 1) making it work and 2) making it fast. What about maintainability? "Code as if the next guy to maintain your code is a homicidal maniac who knows where you live." -Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates In my experience, making something work and making it (relatively) faster is easy. Making it easy to read is hard.

Seems like that's exactly what he doesn't care about. If you're prototyping or writing a lot of one off operations (for data analysis, maybe) then maintainability is less important.

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#12

Post by elteto »

To each its own I guess, but I wanted to say that I don't see "safety, type systems and homoiconicity" and other theoretical "geek" stuff as orthogonal to a programming language's ease of use, productivity and expressiveness. If anything they complement each other. The theory behind it provides a consistent framework so that you minimize the mixing of different paradigms and you can express ideas in a more consistent way. I very much doubt that a language where you just throw stuff in would be easy to use. If Julia is a great language is precisely because of all the thought that went into it, the ideas behind it didn't just materialize in someone's brain.

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#13

Post by untog »

cjfont wrote: post #6

> The problem with most programming languages is they're designed by language geeks, who tend to worry about things that I don't much care for. Safety, type systems, homoiconicity, and so forth. I'm sure these things are great, but when I'm messing around with a new project for fun, my two concerns are 1) making it work and 2) making it fast. For me, code is like a car. It's a means to an end. The "expressiveness" of…

It's more like he wants a fast car but doesn't want to deal with servicing it. So it might fall apart in six months, but that's something he is OK with.

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#15

Post by cjfont »

tptacek wrote: post #9
cjfont wrote: post #6

> The problem with most programming languages is they're designed by language geeks, who tend to worry about things that I don't much care for. Safety, type systems, homoiconicity, and so forth. I'm sure these things are great, but when I'm messing around with a new project for fun, my two concerns are 1) making it work and 2) making it fast. For me, code is like a car. It's a means to an end. The "expressiveness" of…

This is a confusing rebuttal, because cars have an aerodynamic design primarily for performance reasons, and Evan is very clear in this article that his primary concern is performance. I think you've misread him.

And yet he doesn't care about type systems, which are largely implemented to help with optimization, you see.

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#17

Post by vanderZwan »

sdegutis wrote: post #4

This sounds like premature-optimization to me. Maybe it's just me, but in the apps I write in dynamic languages, the bottleneck is rarely in the language. It's usually in some IO. EDIT: some sentence in the article gave me the impression he was using this for non-math-heavy stuff which is why I said this

It is "just you"[1] in this case - the people most enthusiastic about Julia are the people doing statistics, simulations and similar tasks with massive datasets requiring heavy number crunching. I expect fast code and cache issues are the more likely bottlenecks in their situations.

[1] Of course, you might still represent the majority of people using dynamic languages, but you get my point.

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#18

Post by Mikeb85 »

tesmar2 wrote: post #8

> but it's poised to do for technical computing what Node.js is doing for web development I stopped right there. Node.js has only a few great use cases where it shines and in the real world, the vast majority of shops have not switched to using it.

> Node.js has only a few great use cases where it shines and in the real world, the vast majority of shops have not switched to using it.

Of course not. 'Switching' is usually more pain than it's worth, especially if your previous solution works. New start-ups are likely the ones who will be using it, just as Rails took off in the start-up world.

Likewise, R and Python are going to continue to be in use in existing projects, and Julia is the potential future...

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#19

Post by gfodor »

tieTYT wrote: post #3

> my two concerns are 1) making it work and 2) making it fast. What about maintainability? "Code as if the next guy to maintain your code is a homicidal maniac who knows where you live." -Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates In my experience, making something work and making it (relatively) faster is easy. Making it easy to read is hard.

I think the idea is you can hack together your prototype in Julia, and then instead of re-writing it in C, you can either rewrite or hopefully just refactor your existing code into something presentable.

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#20

Post by kibwen »

I'm excited by Julia, but I don't think this article makes a very good sell. It's neat that you can dump the generated assembly, but I'd rather see a demonstration of a robust profiler so that I know which functions I need to dump in the first place.

I also disagree that the popularity of Node stems from "getting disparate groups of programmers to code in the same language". From what I've observed, it's not that back-end programmers are suddenly giddy at the prospect of getting to use Javascript on the server, it's that front-end programmers get to apply their existing knowledge of Javascript to back-end development.

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