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Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem (2022)

yuri.is

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Re: Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem (2022)

#21

Post by Alexander-Barth »

tokai wrote: post #4
jerf wrote: post #2

@dang: I'm not sure exactly when this was posted since it seems to have no date, but it's at least (2022) per HN's link from that year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31396861 I mention this because this is definitely the sort of content that can age poorly. I have no direct experience, I've never so much as touched Julia.

It cites an example from 2024 so the text has definitely been updated since 2022.

The incorrect example of julia's documentation was fixed 2021: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/commit/f31ef767ef9cb0eb1d...

As an experiment, I would be interested to see if somebody would make a 1-based python list-like data structure (or a 0-based R array), to check how many 3rd party (or standard library) function would no longer work.

Re: Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem (2022)

#22

Post by dang »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #11
jerf wrote: post #2

@dang: I'm not sure exactly when this was posted since it seems to have no date, but it's at least (2022) per HN's link from that year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31396861 I mention this because this is definitely the sort of content that can age poorly. I have no direct experience, I've never so much as touched Julia.

We really don't need all the hall monitoring here, it's lame when you see a submission has comments but then it's meta stuff like complaints about dates and titles.

I don't think 'hall monitoring' is fair here - it's standard for HN titles to include the year that an article dates from, and it's standard for users to point out when such a year hasn't been added to the title yet.

Re: Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem (2022)

#24

Post by acomjean »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #3

I think I may have missed what alternative is being recommended instead, after scrolling through the whole article.

We’ve had a lot of scientist use R and the “tidyverse” collection of packages. Ggplot2 is fantastic for graphing.

I thing a lot of them used “rstudio” to browse the data.

https://www.tidyverse.org/

Re: Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem (2022)

#26

Post by wk_end »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #11
jerf wrote: post #2

@dang: I'm not sure exactly when this was posted since it seems to have no date, but it's at least (2022) per HN's link from that year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31396861 I mention this because this is definitely the sort of content that can age poorly. I have no direct experience, I've never so much as touched Julia.

We really don't need all the hall monitoring here, it's lame when you see a submission has comments but then it's meta stuff like complaints about dates and titles.

The culture of "hall monitoring" is one of the best things about HN, IMO. It's one of the few places on the internet where people - including/not just the mods - care about maintaining a high quality of discourse.

Re: Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem (2022)

#27

Post by mgkuhn »

Julia is a very powerful and flexible language. With very powerful tools you can get a lot done quickly, including shooting yourself into the foot. Julia's type-system allows you to easily compose different elements of Julia's vast package ecosystem in ways that possibly were never tested or even intended or foreseen by the authors of these packages to be used that way. If you don't do that, you may have a much better experience than the author. My own Julia code generally does not feed the custom type of one package into the algorithms of another package.

Re: Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem (2022)

#28

Post by [deleted] »

dang wrote: post #16
tokai wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It cites an example from 2024 so the text has definitely been updated since 2022.

Usually when an article is substantively the same but has been updated, we use the original year. I've put 2022 in the title now. The previous HN thread: Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31396861 - May 2022 (407 comments) Edit: since there are (again? I seem to remember this last time) complaints about the title being a bit too baity, I've pilfered that…

[deleted]

Re: Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem (2022)

#29

Post by TimorousBestie »

taikahessu wrote: post #7
TheRealPomax wrote: post #3

I think I may have missed what alternative is being recommended instead, after scrolling through the whole article.

Hinted as Python not having these issues.

Python also suffers from such problems. For example, here’s scipy’s issue tracker, filtered for bugs only:

https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3...

Scrolling through this list, it’s clear that many are “correctness issues.”

I do not link this to argue that scipy bugs are more serious or more frequent. I don’t think that kind of statistical comparison is meaningful.

However, I think a motivated reasoner could write a very similar blog post to the OP, but about $arb_python_lib instead of $arb_julia_lib.

I suppose my position is closer to “only Kahan, Boyd and Higham write correct numerical algorithms” (a hyperbole, but illustrative of the difficulty level).

Re: Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem (2022)

#30

Post by SkiFire13 »

croes wrote: post #6

> My conclusion after using Julia for many years is that there are too many correctness and composability bugs throughout the ecosystem to justify using it in just about any context where correctness matters. Does this have any impact on the cosmological emulator written in Julia? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45346538

I wonder if you can even distinguish correctness issues caused by these bugs in Julia from just the underlaying ML model behaving weirdly.
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