Julia Language Co-Creators Win James H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software

Post by kgwgk » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 5:31 PM UTC

lenticular wrote: post #46

tombert wrote: post #39

I built a very simple neural-network app a few years ago with Julia, and while the project was fun and I didn't think the language was bad by any means, as someone who does software for a living I had trouble seeing why compsci people really got into it. I could totally see someone like my dad using it (he's an aerospace engineer, not software), but I have friends who work in compsci in academia trying to evangelize…

It's extremely expressive. Notably, Julia is homoiconic, with full lisp-style macros. It also has multiple dispatch, which is a far more general technique that OO single-dispatch. This makes it very easy to define modular interfaces that work much like statically-typed type classes in Haskell. This allows you, for example, to define a custom matrix type for your bespoke sparse matrix layout and have it work seamlessl…

Post by goto11 » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 5:34 PM UTC

vectorEQ wrote: post #105

synthmeat wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't reply anymore to flagged-to-death sibling, but wrt "1-based array indexing": I've actually found behaviour of "zero-avoidance" a good battle-tested heuristics to coding. A lot of numeric spaces can be mapped as to be >0 or >0 Arithmetic is much safer without 0.

offset 1 is logical if you look at the machine code / data in memory. if you have array [a,b,c,d] array[0] is a which in computer is logical. why? because it stored in memory 'abcd' (forgetting endianness for sake of argument...) and the offset from the base pointer to a is 0. so it makes perfect sense for arrays to start at 0, as there is no offset from the base... there is not 1 item offset from the base :s if you…

Post by johnsea » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 5:37 PM UTC

mruts wrote: post #50

Julia is interesting, but the block syntax is a little off-putting. I'm not sure why someone would design a language that uses 'end' to delineate a block. Curly brackets make sense. Tabs make sense. But 'end'? All it does is make code harder to read and harder to write.

Post by eigenspace » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 5:43 PM UTC

kgwgk wrote: post #121

lenticular wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's extremely expressive. Notably, Julia is homoiconic, with full lisp-style macros. It also has multiple dispatch, which is a far more general technique that OO single-dispatch. This makes it very easy to define modular interfaces that work much like statically-typed type classes in Haskell. This allows you, for example, to define a custom matrix type for your bespoke sparse matrix layout and have it work seamlessl…

> Julia is homoiconic It depends on what you understand by homoiconic: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31733766/in-what-sense-a...

Post by dmix » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 5:44 PM UTC

baldfat wrote: post #7

spot wrote: post #5

what good is philosophy if you choose arrays based on 1? https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/julia-dev/tNN7...

So does: APL, AWK, COBOL, Fortran, Lua, Mathematica, MATLAB, R, Smalltalk, Wolfram Because it is Mathmatics and have 1 be based on 0 makes no sense, you then have to switch between the two and it is easy to make a mistake. This is why I don't use Python and Pandas. I got burnt once and that was enough and switched to R. Sadly we are stuck with 0 based array in programming and due to a historical issue.