Federal Reserve Bank of NY converts major economic model to Julia • Hacker News Board

Re: Federal Reserve Bank of NY converts major economic model to Julia

#11

Post by Coding_Cat » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 4:55 PM UTC

wyager wrote: post #8

chollida1 wrote: post #2

Cool, despite Julia replacing matlab here, it looks like the biggest loser to Julia's rise might be Octave. Matlab will always have its proponents, that will use it no matter what, but if Julia keeps encroaching on this territory, I'm not sure where that leaves Ocatve. To the model discussed in this paper, check out this series of blog posts for more information: http://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2014/09/f…

> Matlab will always have its proponents I honestly can't understand why. I'm currently in a computer vision class that uses Matlab, and it's literally the worst language I've ever used in my life. The design is nonsensical, bordering on malicious I've always thought that the biggest problem with python was that as programs get bigger, you're likely to run into some confusion due to the lack of static typing and subs…

if scale is a vector say [1, 2, 3] then x+scale = [1+x, 2+x, 3+x], and in Matlab [ [1,2,3], 4] = [1, 2, 3, 4].

I agree with all you said mind you, and could rant even more about Matlab, just giving a possible explanation for how Matlab parses the expression.

Re: Federal Reserve Bank of NY converts major economic model to Julia

#12

Post by johnmyleswhite » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 5:06 PM UTC

tiffanyh wrote: post #5

I'm always found Julia performance claims [1] to be misleading in comparison to LuaJit [2]. Because Julia claims to be much faster than LuaJIT, yet continually - people find that LuaJIT (not Julia) is much faster in real world test [3]. Does anyone else have experience in Julia vs LuaJIT? [1] http://julialang.org/#high-performance-jit-compiler [2] http://luajit.org/performance_x86.html [3] http://bayesanalytic.com/lu…

I think it would be really interesting to understand exactly why Julia underperforms LuaJIT on some benchmarks. I'm pretty skeptical that Julia loses to LuaJIT uniformly; I suspect it depends on the benchmark taking advantage of LuaJIT's superior discovery of run-time type information.

Re: Federal Reserve Bank of NY converts major economic model to Julia

#13

Post by danso » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 5:07 PM UTC

For those of you in this field...how influential is the NYFed trying out (and apparently being satisfied with) Julia to other government agencies, computational economists, and/or academics? Is it "OS X is Unix/BSD-based" influential, or "Whitehouse.gov uses Drupal [1]" influential?

[1] http://buytaert.net/whitehouse-gov-using-drupal

Re: Federal Reserve Bank of NY converts major economic model to Julia

#14

Post by baldfat » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 5:07 PM UTC

krapht wrote: post #9

wyager wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Matlab will always have its proponents I honestly can't understand why. I'm currently in a computer vision class that uses Matlab, and it's literally the worst language I've ever used in my life. The design is nonsensical, bordering on malicious I've always thought that the biggest problem with python was that as programs get bigger, you're likely to run into some confusion due to the lack of static typing and subs…

Libraries. Inertia. The IDE is actually far more polished than Spyder. It makes things easier for non-programmers with many wizards, and excellent help files. The toolboxes are uniformly fairly high quality. I should mention again the help files. Matlab documentation is comprehensive and far better than any of its competitors. There are many research institutions and workplaces where the cost of the tool isn't really…

> The main competitor is Python

I would say that it really is R. Python while a good choice is a fraction of the size of R and R as a domain specific language excels in its own realm.

Using R with RStudio and sticking with Hadley Wickham universe with Functional Programming makes R shine. There is a reason why so many companies invest in R.

Re: Federal Reserve Bank of NY converts major economic model to Julia

#15

Post by baldfat » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 5:10 PM UTC

tiffanyh wrote: post #5

I'm always found Julia performance claims [1] to be misleading in comparison to LuaJit [2]. Because Julia claims to be much faster than LuaJIT, yet continually - people find that LuaJIT (not Julia) is much faster in real world test [3]. Does anyone else have experience in Julia vs LuaJIT? [1] http://julialang.org/#high-performance-jit-compiler [2] http://luajit.org/performance_x86.html [3] http://bayesanalytic.com/lu…

I find benchmarking to be of little value when the percentages are small. The differences are tiny when I see them don.

Re: Federal Reserve Bank of NY converts major economic model to Julia

#16

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 5:12 PM UTC

wyager wrote: post #8

chollida1 wrote: post #2

Cool, despite Julia replacing matlab here, it looks like the biggest loser to Julia's rise might be Octave. Matlab will always have its proponents, that will use it no matter what, but if Julia keeps encroaching on this territory, I'm not sure where that leaves Ocatve. To the model discussed in this paper, check out this series of blog posts for more information: http://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2014/09/f…

> Matlab will always have its proponents I honestly can't understand why. I'm currently in a computer vision class that uses Matlab, and it's literally the worst language I've ever used in my life. The design is nonsensical, bordering on malicious I've always thought that the biggest problem with python was that as programs get bigger, you're likely to run into some confusion due to the lack of static typing and subs…

It works well enough and there's an incredible amount of infrastructure behind it. It's an academic's job to produce research, not code.

Re: Federal Reserve Bank of NY converts major economic model to Julia

#17

Post by nkassis » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 5:17 PM UTC

krapht wrote: post #9

wyager wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Matlab will always have its proponents I honestly can't understand why. I'm currently in a computer vision class that uses Matlab, and it's literally the worst language I've ever used in my life. The design is nonsensical, bordering on malicious I've always thought that the biggest problem with python was that as programs get bigger, you're likely to run into some confusion due to the lack of static typing and subs…

Libraries. Inertia. The IDE is actually far more polished than Spyder. It makes things easier for non-programmers with many wizards, and excellent help files. The toolboxes are uniformly fairly high quality. I should mention again the help files. Matlab documentation is comprehensive and far better than any of its competitors. There are many research institutions and workplaces where the cost of the tool isn't really…

"There are many research institutions and workplaces where the cost of the tool isn't really thought about at all. In fact, the cost of Matlab and toolbox fees is a small fraction of a senior scientist/engineer's total compensation."

Yeah that's my experience with my current job. Matlab licenses aren't an issue. Also many people have Bloomberg terminals and other expensive tools of that trade that make Matlab look fairly cheap in comparison.

For a language to beat out Matlab it will need to be based on other factors than cost. Most likely performance, documentation, training, tooling and be popular within the pool of candidates for jobs. Hopefully Julia can get there.

Re: Federal Reserve Bank of NY converts major economic model to Julia

#18

Post by bachmeier » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 5:32 PM UTC

danso wrote: post #13

For those of you in this field...how influential is the NYFed trying out (and apparently being satisfied with) Julia to other government agencies, computational economists, and/or academics? Is it "OS X is Unix/BSD-based" influential, or "Whitehouse.gov uses Drupal [1]" influential? [1] http://buytaert.net/whitehouse-gov-using-drupal

To be honest, it will have very little influence. Economists don't like to change their tools.

Re: Federal Reserve Bank of NY converts major economic model to Julia

#19

Post by bachmeier » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 5:34 PM UTC

The real news here is not the move to Julia (although that is likely to be the reason for most of the attention). The important thing is the move to open - an open language, movement to Github, nice explanation of the details.

Re: Federal Reserve Bank of NY converts major economic model to Julia

#20

Post by jordigh » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 5:46 PM UTC

chollida1 wrote: post #2

Cool, despite Julia replacing matlab here, it looks like the biggest loser to Julia's rise might be Octave. Matlab will always have its proponents, that will use it no matter what, but if Julia keeps encroaching on this territory, I'm not sure where that leaves Ocatve. To the model discussed in this paper, check out this series of blog posts for more information: http://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2014/09/f…

> it looks like the biggest loser to Julia's rise might be Octave.

It's not a competition. Julia is our friend, not a rival to Octave. We're on good terms with their developers. Occasionally we share ideas and patches back and forth when it makes sense. They've asked me for help with their Octave benchmark and I've gladly provided it.

Octave being unnecessary is Octave's ultimate goal. When nobody cares about Matlab, probably nobody will care about Octave either. But as long as people care about Matlab, Octave will be relevant. Or perhaps, in a perfect world, enough people will stop caring about Matlab that Octave can start leading in fixing the biggest stupidities in the programming language (we already do this to some degree, but keep relenting and replicating Matlab's bugs because code depends on those bugs).

If Julia is gaining the minds of people in scientific computing, great. It's going to take them away from Matlab and Octave to equal degree. If we can all do our computing unfettered by proprietary licenses, I don't care if it means we end up using Octave or Julia as long as we stop using Matlab.

And many of Matlab's alleged proponents keep turning to Octave. Octave still fills a niche that Julia does not: being able to use Matlab code freely.