Julia: A fresh approach to numerical computing
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Re: Julia: A fresh approach to numerical computing
#2Despite having a very similar title, this is a rather different paper from http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.5145. We had to upload a version of this paper for a grant application, but it's still somewhat in progress.
Re: Julia: A fresh approach to numerical computing
#3Despite having a very similar title, this is a rather different paper from http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.5145 . We had to upload a version of this paper for a grant application, but it's still somewhat in progress.
That's right. The purpose was to have twin papers - one for the Computer Science community focussed on language implementation, which is the earlier paper.
This paper focusses on motivating the design of Julia for the larger scientific community. Any comments will be incredibly valuable in improving the quality of the paper.
Re: Julia: A fresh approach to numerical computing
#4What I would like to know before jumping in a new programming language is what it sucks at and how badly it sucks there.
Never in my life have I ever heard anyone say anything good about how wonderful it is language X is good at y which is what it was designed for. I have however heard plenty of people cursing languages for not doing something which they thought was an "obvious" thing for a language to do and X didn't.
Re: Julia: A fresh approach to numerical computing
#5Despite having a very similar title, this is a rather different paper from http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.5145 . We had to upload a version of this paper for a grant application, but it's still somewhat in progress.
That's right. The purpose was to have twin papers - one for the Computer Science community focussed on language implementation, which is the earlier paper. This paper focusses on motivating the design of Julia for the larger scientific community. Any comments will be incredibly valuable in improving the quality of the paper.
It's great to have a paper like this on the arXiv, I believe this is the right way to reach the scientific community.
Some ideas for improvements:
The package directory could be mentioned more prominently.
It's a bit tricky to select code in the PDF, not sure if much can be done about this?
Re: Julia: A fresh approach to numerical computing
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's right. The purpose was to have twin papers - one for the Computer Science community focussed on language implementation, which is the earlier paper. This paper focusses on motivating the design of Julia for the larger scientific community. Any comments will be incredibly valuable in improving the quality of the paper.
It's great to have a paper like this on the arXiv, I believe this is the right way to reach the scientific community. Some ideas for improvements: The package directory could be mentioned more prominently. It's a bit tricky to select code in the PDF, not sure if much can be done about this?
I guess we can publish the IJulia notebooks with the examples and even just the code as plain .jl files.
Re: Julia: A fresh approach to numerical computing
#7What I would like to know before jumping in a new programming language is what it sucks at and how badly it sucks there. Never in my life have I ever heard anyone say anything good about how wonderful it is language X is good at y which is what it was designed for. I have however heard plenty of people cursing languages for not doing something which they thought was an "obvious" thing for a language to do and X didn'…
I would say Julia sucks for embedded programming :); building graphical clients - although not badly as there are various js libaries that it can chat to, games programming, it's not great at data base interaction although once you have the data in it it is fine (frames). The last point is a bit of a development area I would expect to see because Julia has a console and this means that interactive querying would be great - like SQL on steroids but currently without the sql unfortunatley.
Julia shines at developing efficient reusable code for crunching numbers. The type system is really nice, and the syntax is very clean and natural (to me!)
Re: Julia: A fresh approach to numerical computing
#8What I would like to know before jumping in a new programming language is what it sucks at and how badly it sucks there. Never in my life have I ever heard anyone say anything good about how wonderful it is language X is good at y which is what it was designed for. I have however heard plenty of people cursing languages for not doing something which they thought was an "obvious" thing for a language to do and X didn'…
What I'd like to know when learning a new language is: why can't this be done in an existing language?
Take for example the R programming language. Things you do in this language can be perfectly well done in e.g. Python too. Same goes for the MATLAB language.
Re: Julia: A fresh approach to numerical computing
#9What I would like to know before jumping in a new programming language is what it sucks at and how badly it sucks there. Never in my life have I ever heard anyone say anything good about how wonderful it is language X is good at y which is what it was designed for. I have however heard plenty of people cursing languages for not doing something which they thought was an "obvious" thing for a language to do and X didn'…
I would say Julia sucks for embedded programming :); building graphical clients - although not badly as there are various js libaries that it can chat to, games programming, it's not great at data base interaction although once you have the data in it it is fine (frames). The last point is a bit of a development area I would expect to see because Julia has a console and this means that interactive querying would be g…
There is work happening on the UI side in Julia. While we are some ways away from building graphical clients in Julia, we do have GTK bindings and such.
For some interesting ideas borrowed from Elm, do see: https://github.com/shashi/Patchwork.jl
Re: Julia: A fresh approach to numerical computing
#10What I would like to know before jumping in a new programming language is what it sucks at and how badly it sucks there. Never in my life have I ever heard anyone say anything good about how wonderful it is language X is good at y which is what it was designed for. I have however heard plenty of people cursing languages for not doing something which they thought was an "obvious" thing for a language to do and X didn'…
What I'd like to know when learning a new language is: why can't this be done in an existing language? Take for example the R programming language. Things you do in this language can be perfectly well done in e.g. Python too. Same goes for the MATLAB language.
Isn't this... exactly what the linked paper tries to explain? The very first three bullet points are a great overview of the traditions Julia breaks away from, and the rest explains how the language enables that.
Can you clarify which parts can easily be done in other languages and how?