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Julia, I Love You

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Re: Julia, I Love You

#2

Post by ajdecon »

Edit: Title asks for downsides (but it seems like tue kind of title that might be changed)

Disclaimer: I really like Julia, and loving it for some numerical stuff right now. That said...

Potential downsides:

- Very new, standard libs are still in flux

- Matlab-like syntax, which I have mixed feelings on

- Clustered parallelism uses ssh for transport, which I find slow (vs MPI)

- 1-based array indices (for Matlab and Fortran familiarity)

Re: Julia, I Love You

#3

Post by nwienert »

I'm actually especially interested in taking the [web server](https://github.com/chzyer/JuliaWebServer) and building out a lean-and-mean MVC framework.

Though it's designed as a scientific language, their goals of having C-like speed and yet Ruby-like beauty make it the perfect target for such a project.

Anyone else interested in trying it out with me?

Re: Julia, I Love You

#5

Post by jergosh »

As for replacing R, the whole problem is that no-one is really a fan of the syntax but there is an staggering number of packages ready to use. Bioconductor (tools for analysis of biological data: http://www.bioconductor.org/) alone is over 500 packages whose functionality is most likely not implemented for any other language/platform.

Re: Julia, I Love You

#6

Post by bglusman »

nwienert wrote: post #3

I'm actually especially interested in taking the [web server]( https://github.com/chzyer/JuliaWebServer ) and building out a lean-and-mean MVC framework. Though it's designed as a scientific language, their goals of having C-like speed and yet Ruby-like beauty make it the perfect target for such a project. Anyone else interested in trying it out with me?

I'm interested, but no idea how much help I'll be :-) Feel free to ping me and would love to try and help, as I've been wanting some context to learn and play with Julia since finding out about it, and being able to do web work in it would be great. Be nice to learn something about web frameworks design and whatnot at the same time!

Re: Julia, I Love You

#7

Post by codezero »

ajdecon wrote: post #2

Edit: Title asks for downsides (but it seems like tue kind of title that might be changed) Disclaimer: I really like Julia, and loving it for some numerical stuff right now. That said... Potential downsides: - Very new, standard libs are still in flux - Matlab-like syntax, which I have mixed feelings on - Clustered parallelism uses ssh for transport, which I find slow (vs MPI) - 1-based array indices (for Matlab and…

Not to be pedantic, but Fortran 1-based array indices are from Fortran 66 and earlier. Fortran 77 and on include the ability to index from any arbitrary integer, including negative ones.

You can declare a 21 element array indexed from -10 like so:

real x(-10:10)

So hopefully anyone familiar with Fortran isn't hung up on 1-based indices.

Re: Julia, I Love You

#8

Post by thu »

From the post:

  For a more powerful example (lifted straight from the Julia docs), we can compare Julia and R code for computing the 25th Fibonacci number recursively.
How is it a powerful example? How is it meaningful when comparing programming languages (and implementations)? Maybe it is just a 4/1 joke? Or is it really meaningful for people who otherwise use R?

Re: Julia, I Love You

#9

Post by dfc »

thu wrote: post #8

From the post: For a more powerful example (lifted straight from the Julia docs), we can compare Julia and R code for computing the 25th Fibonacci number recursively. How is it a powerful example? How is it meaningful when comparing programming languages (and implementations)? Maybe it is just a 4/1 joke? Or is it really meaningful for people who otherwise use R?

500 > 75

In the context of speed, 500 times slower is more dramatic than 75 times slower.

Re: Julia, I Love You

#10

Post by Jun8 »

Possibly sexist question: Does giving a female name to a programming language increase the rate of its adoption? AFAIK, this is the only such language (perl was nearly named gloria, though!). Does anyone know the etymology of the name (julialang.org seems to be down, so I couldn't check there)? There are Julia sets but that's for the lastname of the mathematician Gaston Julia.
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