191–200 of 258 posts
Does Julia have AOT compiler which produces a binary which can be linked to a C program? I am asking this because I have to consider availability on iOS - which is a platform prohibits JIT.
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 "…
I believe it has been one of the intentions for a while. How far it has advanced, I'm not sure, I haven't looked at it for almost a year, now time for a refresher. But R may be a bit tricky to compete with directly at this point: it has been designed as a statistical language from the ground up, and it would be a while for any language to catch up to R's library. But, I still see many people doing statistical computa…
It's mostly around the multitude of subtly different types and the ways you convert between them. I think I also remember strange things like lists having named attributes in addition to list members that just seemed totally wrong and confusing to me.
I wish I could give you better specifics but it's been several years since I've done anything with R.
To each its own I guess, but I wanted to say that I don't see "safety, type systems and homoiconicity" and other theoretical "geek" stuff as orthogonal to a programming language's ease of use, productivity and expressiveness. If anything they complement each other. The theory behind it provides a consistent framework so that you minimize the mixing of different paradigms and you can express ideas in a more consistent…
I don't think his point is that "safety, type systems and homoiconicity" don't matter. His point is that those things don't interest him as much as getting things done do. Those things may help him get things done, but they're for other people to worry about while he works on his own stuff. Also, am I the only one that doesn't know what 'orthogonal' means? I assume from the context it means that these things aren't m…
FYI
"Julia was not designed by language geeks — it came from math, science, and engineering MIT students" This statement is built on a false dichotomy. And it is not really true for Julia, take the type system for example, sophisticated AND unintrusive.
Jeff and I were slightly miffed at being called "not language nerds" ;-)
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I remember there being talk of eventually being able to call Julia from within Python. I've also been quite happy using Numba as an alternative to Cython for some things when I need speed. It's a lot more light-weight with less boilerplate, although still a little rough around the edges.
I don't know about calling Julia from within Python, but you can call python from within Julia. This makes it very easy to wrap and use python libraries for things which Julia doesn't have good support for yet.
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His point is: while these things can be nice, no one cares about them other than language designer. They are only means to an end, which is user experience. Sure, some car buyers may know or care what alloy their cylinder block is made of, but a lot don't know, and don't care, how many cylinders there are. They only care (somewhat) about how it drives. And it is certainly possible to have a language with all the theo…
Hmm, this is an accurate description on how a lot of research work is run.But then there are the cases where that data analysis that was put together within a week is suddenly used by the whole research group, amended, extended and used with more and more data. Sometimes someone even sticks a GUI on top, plots and consecutive analysis steps are added, etc. And this is when you really want to have a language that can…
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.
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Yeah, networkx is pretty good -- I actually meant that network analysis and text processing are the two areas where I'd be quite comfortable recommending Python over Matlab. For time series data, I'd personally pick R though, or perhaps SAS if it's large enough -- at least if any statistical analysis is involved... I need to check out Spyder.
R is a software that I still need to check out. I think enthought offers commercial tooling and support and also a IDE platform with tools for data story telling etc.. I usually use vim.