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Why I'm Betting On Julia

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Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#181

Post by mrks_hy »

Beliavsky wrote: post #156
john_b wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The language may have been grating, but as someone who also comes from more of a scientific computing background, I read this as "I want a language to be a tool that I can use to solve scientific and engineering problems with minimal conceptual overhead due to minding language features." I read it as saying "Finally, a language designed for someone like me," which I also find true personally.

"I want a language to be a tool that I can use to solve scientific and engineering problems with minimal conceptual overhead due to minding language features." Among compiled languages, isn't that Fortran, especially since Fortran 90 on have multidimensional array operations, like Julia, Numpy, and Matlab.

It should read the other way round - Julia, Numpy, especially Matlab have array operations like Fortran 90, since they are designed by people from that background.

The problem with Fortran is interoperabality with other libraries; if you leave scientific computing, you're basically out of luck. Writing a GUI is just not going to happen. It is really fast, but it is also not as easy for prototyping since it is also compiled like C. Finally, Fortran does have the kind of stigma coming from older versions like 77 - and it's still really easy to write REALLY bad and unmaintainable code with it if you're not minding the newer language features. Especially OOP (since Fortran 2003) feels a bit tacked on.

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#182

Post by RivieraKid »

I've used Julia for couple of projects and it's amazing, I seriously believe that Julia is better - in several ways - than all of the widely used dynamic languages like Python, Ruby, Clojure, Octave or Lua. It's a brilliantly designed language. There are so many things to like about this language.

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#183

Post by lelandbatey »

tesmar2 wrote: post #8

> but it's poised to do for technical computing what Node.js is doing for web development I stopped right there. Node.js has only a few great use cases where it shines and in the real world, the vast majority of shops have not switched to using it.

I'm not a Node.js user and I'v certainly gotten the feeling that it's rapidly proliferating and shaking things up. Given that it's less than 5 years old, I think that's pretty cool.

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#184

Post by Fomite »

john_b wrote: post #126
candybar wrote: post #71

I really don't like the anti-intellectual tone of the beginning. "The problem with most programming languages is they're designed by language geeks, who tend to worry about things that I don't much care for. Safety, type systems, homoiconicity, and so forth." can be rewritten as: "The problem with most software is that they are designed by computer geeks, who tend to worry about things that I don't much care for. Inf…

The language may have been grating, but as someone who also comes from more of a scientific computing background, I read this as "I want a language to be a tool that I can use to solve scientific and engineering problems with minimal conceptual overhead due to minding language features." I read it as saying "Finally, a language designed for someone like me," which I also find true personally.

Exactly - I read it as an expression of a tool designed as a tool, rather than an elegant and intellectually fulfilling exploration of toolness.

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#185

Post by xixi77 »

smortaz wrote: post #96

mini ASK HN: would there be any interest in supporting Julia in Visual Studio? (as a free/oss plugin). i lead the Python Tools for Visual Studio project at msft and would be curious if there is interest. as a side note, if you do you use Python & require Python/C++ debugging, PTVS now supports it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJaKQ94lBY#t=10

That would be actually quite awesome.

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#186

Post by Fomite »

Homunculiheaded wrote: post #144
haberman wrote: post #117

Can Julia be a competitor to R? I love R in concept (interactive environment for statistical analysis) but the language just drives me crazy in its multitude of types and the loosey-goosey ways it converts between them. A friend of mine is really proficient with R; when I walked him through some of the R patterns that are very confusing/irregular to me, he sort of laughed: he could see what I was saying but he said "…

The biggest thing that R has is just an incredible amount of really well documented packages, that are quite frequently cutting edge (unless you want to do any deep learning work). Not to mention that the base R has just a tremendous amount of useful stuff baked in. I've kept an eye on Julia and would love to use it in my everyday work, but also know that for now that's just not possible because of how many built-in…

This is, I think, the biggest hurdle for Julia.

R's strength is not its language, it's the people. You need methods articles with supplements written in Julia, not R, for people to switch.

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#187

Post by Fomite »

john_b wrote: post #141
evanspa wrote: post #42

When I read the opening paragraph, I immediately thought of the author as a Blub programmer [1]. "The problem with most programming languages is they're designed by language geeks, who tend to worry about things that I don't much care for. Safety, type systems, homoiconicity, and so forth. I'm sure these things are great..." Yes, those things are great. They ultimately aid in helping the programmer tackle the inevita…

You're assuming the author wants to use Julia to build complex systems. Much of scientific computing has no need to do so, but is more concerned with discovering new knowledge and testing new ideas. Once the knowledge is gained, products may be built around that knowledge or new inquirires may be launched from it, but scientific computing usually uses programming languages as research tools rather than development to…

This. The amount of code I write that never gets touched again after a paper goes to press is staggering.

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#188

Post by steveklabnik »

kisielk wrote: post #131
avodonosov wrote: post #116

The reason to bet on Julia is disassembling a function? This is a standard feature in Common Lisp (ANSI standardized in 1994) CL-USER> (defun f(x) (* x x)) F CL-USER> (disassemble 'f) L0 (leaq (@ (:^ L0) (% rip)) (% fn)) ; [0] (cmpl ($ 8) (% nargs)) ; [7] (jne L33) ; [10] (pushq (% rbp)) ; [12] (movq (% rsp) (% rbp)) ; [13] (pushq (% arg_z)) ; [16] (movq (% arg_z) (% arg_y)) ; [17] (leaveq) ; [20] (jmpq (@ .SPBUILTIN…

This is also possible to a degree in Python, though you only get the bytecode: >>> def f(x): ... return x * x ... >>> import dis >>> print dis.dis(f) 2 0 LOAD_FAST 0 (x) 3 LOAD_FAST 0 (x) 6 BINARY_MULTIPLY 7 RETURN_VALUE

You can get the bytecode in Ruby too: http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-2.1.0/RubyVM/InstructionSequenc...

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#189

Post by Stubb »

StefanKarpinski wrote: post #112
wirrbel wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the rescue of numpy: A matrix from linear algebra and a 2D array are not exactly the same. In Python they are different convertible types and I think in practice it is hardly a drawback. That the multiplication operation is overloaded in the Mathematical World with the same symbol as the "normal" multiplication is unfortunate, numpys solution is as good as introducing two different operators (with one being an awk…

> That the multiplication operation is overloaded in the Mathematical World with the same symbol as the "normal" multiplication is unfortunate, numpy's solution is as good as introducing two different operators The thing is that the multiplication operation for matrices is matrix multiplication, not elementwise multiplication. When you apply a polynomial like x^2 + y to matrices, you do not want to apply the polynomi…

I cheered out loud when I first started tinkering with Julia, tested whether multiplication did the right thing with matrices and vectors, and saw that they did. Multiplying two row vectors should give an error! Element-by-element operations should get their own operator, not the other way around.

But as a long-time R user, I'm hesitant to bet the farm on Julia for a project at work where it would be ideally suited. Maybe there's a way to squeeze it in on the side.

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#190

Post by kazagistar »

zhaodaxiong wrote: post #128
kevinalexbrown wrote: post #48

When out with friends recently, one of them mentioned how awesome Julia is. I was surprised to hear someone talk about it, even from another person in science. She turned and gushed about how awesome it was, how supportive the community was, even though she was "not really someone who likes programming." And she liked it so much she was telling her friends about it at a bar! If you make a programming language that pe…

Julia is good, in ............ (10,000 words omitted) I think any serious programmer understand the importance of specifying context. For this article, the author should write: I dont care about type safety, security, etc, when I ......... (10,000 words). The title is flaming and shallow in any measure of programming language discussion...

Um, you know that Julia has type annotations, right? They are optional, but if you are a shop that really really wants type safety, you can get it.
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