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Julia 0.5 Highlights

julialang.org

11–20 of 64 posts

Re: Julia 0.5 Highlights

#11
I'll be honest, giant factor speedups are awesome, and I always look forward to writeups about the discovery process and such, but I'm of the opinion that the presence of those optimizations in recent history means the software is often many years from actual maturity and suitability for production usage.

Either way, looking forward to reading about where the optimizations themselves came from.

Re: Julia 0.5 Highlights

#12
WRT julia's type system: I still don't get it. Is Julia dynamically or statically typed? Are type errors detected at compile time (or since it's jitted when loading a file) or at runtime (i.e. when the code is executed)? I personally don't see much use in just another dynamically typed language that gives me similar errors as R does.

Re: Julia 0.5 Highlights

#13

WRT julia's type system: I still don't get it. Is Julia dynamically or statically typed? Are type errors detected at compile time (or since it's jitted when loading a file) or at runtime (i.e. when the code is executed)? I personally don't see much use in just another dynamically typed language that gives me similar errors as R does.

Dynamic: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28078089/is-julia-dynamic...

Julia uses its type system for:

- self-documentation

- reduction of boilerplate manual type checking that litters libraries in dynamic languages

- all those times you need to express the type of something, which happens especially frequently in numerical code

- performance

In the future, some "type linting" could be built into the standard library since we can infer types for so much code, but it isn't the top priority.

Re: Julia 0.5 Highlights

#14
post #8

5 years ago I thought for sure I would be using Julia today. (I mostly use R) I have found that news tools have come into play that I haven't really felt the need for a faster language then R for my work. I'm interested in people's everyday use of Julia and how it has impacted your workflow. I don't work with "Big Data" most of my data sets are bellow 100k in size. Anyone using Julia for medium and small data sets?

[deleted]

Re: Julia 0.5 Highlights

#16
post #8

5 years ago I thought for sure I would be using Julia today. (I mostly use R) I have found that news tools have come into play that I haven't really felt the need for a faster language then R for my work. I'm interested in people's everyday use of Julia and how it has impacted your workflow. I don't work with "Big Data" most of my data sets are bellow 100k in size. Anyone using Julia for medium and small data sets?

I thought the same thing as well. Unfortunately, there is still a bit of work to be done on the Julia side. The tidyverse ecosystem in R has relentlessly focused on ease of use and package compatibility, such that everything "fits" together in a logical way. I can't emphasize enough how much of a difference this makes in being productive with a language. Many of the things I do on a regular basis in R are actually rather mundane, and are possible to do in Julia. But it's just much more of a pleasure to do them in R.

Fortunately the DataFrames ecosystem and related packages (like Query.jl and StructuredQueries.jl) seem to be headed in the right direction.

Re: Julia 0.5 Highlights

#17
post #8

5 years ago I thought for sure I would be using Julia today. (I mostly use R) I have found that news tools have come into play that I haven't really felt the need for a faster language then R for my work. I'm interested in people's everyday use of Julia and how it has impacted your workflow. I don't work with "Big Data" most of my data sets are bellow 100k in size. Anyone using Julia for medium and small data sets?

I have found that news tools have come into play that I haven't really felt the need for a faster language then R for my work

Could you elaborate? Which new tools?

Re: Julia 0.5 Highlights

#18
post #7

I'm curious to hear from people who are using Julia on a regular basis. What's the UX like? I only looked at it briefly and was turned off by some things (1-based indexing comes to mind). But I really liked other things (multiple dispatch).

1-based for statistics is a STRONG reason to use it. 0 based is ridiculous for a statistics program and the reason why I left Python. I understand for looping and the arras to be internally 0 but when doing statistics I should have to use two different index.

1-based for statistics is a STRONG reason to use it. 0 based is ridiculous for a statistics program

Could you elaborate on that? What about statistics do you feel makes it necessary to have 1-based indexing?

Re: Julia 0.5 Highlights

#19
post #8

5 years ago I thought for sure I would be using Julia today. (I mostly use R) I have found that news tools have come into play that I haven't really felt the need for a faster language then R for my work. I'm interested in people's everyday use of Julia and how it has impacted your workflow. I don't work with "Big Data" most of my data sets are bellow 100k in size. Anyone using Julia for medium and small data sets?

Not to be snarky, but we announced Julia in Feb 2012, which is less than 5 years ago. Unless you happened to be in the MIT class that used Julia in the Fall of 2011, you're probably overestimating how long you've been following the project.

If you're comfortable using R and the tooling and performance it offers, you should probably keep using it. Julia isn't just about big data, but it does tend to appeal to people who are struggling with problems that are sufficiently hard that their old tools left them in a world of pain. That pain may comes from size, complexity, CPU-intensiveness, or need for more language expressiveness (a hard thing to define). In particular, Julia offers a unique combination of productivity and speed for numerical work that can't be found anywhere else.

Re: Julia 0.5 Highlights

#20
post #9
post #6

Exciting to hear -- I have used Julia for prototyping, and have found it to be excellent for that: In my experience there are still some rough edges as compared to the Python ecosystem (of course!), which together with the 0.x status make it impractical for many production situations. However it is fantastic for prototyping numerical code, the type system is a pleasure, and the JuMP mathematical optimization library…

Really interested in why you would use a "faster" language in julia then move to a "slower" language like Python or R?

Numba and Cython can be very competitive with Julia.
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