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A Lisper's first impression of Julia

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Re: A Lisper's first impression of Julia

#21

Post by [deleted] »

PuercoPop wrote: post #20
andrewflnr wrote: post #8

It seems weird to try to characterize Julia in terms of object-oriented programming. Is that just me? Julia's approach to subtyping and multiple dispatch is sufficiently different from the C++ and Python approaches to OOP that I don't even put them in the same bucket, and it seems about as far away from CL's objects as well. Julia doesn't really advertise itself as OO; you can't even find the word "object" on the fro…

It only seems weird in so far that you are ignorant (aren't we all?) of the generic function approach to object orientation. In the message passing approach you dispatch based on the type of the first argument to the method. Because it would be redundant to explicitly write down the argument it is commonly syntactically elided (though not fully in Python) and you get coupling of the methods and the object. This is no…

[deleted]

Re: A Lisper's first impression of Julia

#23

Post by StefanKarpinski »

peterashford wrote: post #22

What is the ecosystem for Julia like? Could it be considered for systems programming tasks?

Define systems programming. If you mean could you write servers in it, then yes (there's a web stack for it already). If you want to write an OS kernel in Julia, then you probably could, but I'm not sure you'd want to.

Re: A Lisper's first impression of Julia

#24

Post by ics »

StefanKarpinski wrote: post #23
peterashford wrote: post #22

What is the ecosystem for Julia like? Could it be considered for systems programming tasks?

Define systems programming. If you mean could you write servers in it, then yes (there's a web stack for it already). If you want to write an OS kernel in Julia, then you probably could, but I'm not sure you'd want to.

There are times when having an English word for "no, well– yes, but I don't know why you'd want to" would be very useful. It'd have to be pretty short to save breath every time a computer scientist must answer the question, "But is it a systems programming language?"

Re: A Lisper's first impression of Julia

#25

Post by alexthomas »

mjburgess wrote: post #2

This is a refreshingly specific post. Many articles of this kind ham-fistedly define various philosophical criteria throughout the post and make sketchy judgements within these. Here however there is just "here's the main comparative languages, here's the difference, here's where there may be issues". NB. I'm very much in favour of a principled (qua philosophical) approach to language comparison (etc.) but its rarely…

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▂ ▄ ▅ ▇ ­­­­L­­­­I­­­­F­­­­E­­­­T­­­­I­­­­M­­­­E ­­­­O­­­­P­­­­P­­­­O­­­­R­­­­T­­­­U­­­­N­­­­I­­­­T­­­­Y­­­­ ▇ ▅ ▄ ▂ ▁

>>>>>>>>>➜➜➜➜➜➜➜ ➜➜➜➜➜➜➜➜➜➜➜➜➜➜ W­W­W­.­P­A­Y­R­A­P­.c­ℴ­m

Re: A Lisper's first impression of Julia

#26

Post by kazagistar »

peterashford wrote: post #22

What is the ecosystem for Julia like? Could it be considered for systems programming tasks?

No. Julia makes extensive use of garbage collection, and has potentially very spikey latency, because any time it runs code which it hasn't run before (or the same code with different types passed in) it runs the compiler. Oh yeah, so that also means it needs LLVM as part of the runtime system.

It is an amazing language for its intended use, which is algorithmic code. From a language perspective, I would chose it over Matlab, R, Numpy, etc any day. It is approachable for grizzled library writers (types, optimizations, introspection at many levels, macros, etc) and more "casual" untrained scientist types (who just want to punch in their algorithm and call it a day). But if you want systems programming, there are plenty of other languages which fill that niche better.

Re: A Lisper's first impression of Julia

#27

Post by pjmlp »

rayiner wrote: post #19
616c wrote: post #14

As an aside (and please do not take it as a flame), this is a very neat article that shows a class of languages in a paradigm I have never considered: Lispy languages (semantically) without Lisp morpho-syntax. I had heard of Julia of course, and see a few mentions here and there of Dylan. It is interesting Dylan had such little interest, or even similar projects, because everyone complains about Lisp syntax (as I see…

Aside from Apple having abandoned the language, the basic issue is that Dylan projects were very ambitiois. Dylan was aimed at C++, so Harlequin and CMU spent a huge amount of time developing sophisticated native code compilers, thread-safe GC, compilation to native executables, etc. Harlequin also did a whole IDE, with GUI toolkit and Emacs-like editor, all written in Dylan and self-hosted. Ruby, Python, etc, showed…

> There's a renaissance in native-compiled languages now, mainly thanks to LLVM and the JVM

No, technology just goes in circles.

Like 30 years ago when people started to realize P-Code and other VM approaches were too slow and resource hungry to be useful targeting minicomputers.

Now mobiles and high electricity costs are making developers reach the same conclusions again.

Re: A Lisper's first impression of Julia

#28

Post by LeonidasXIV »

ics wrote: post #24
StefanKarpinski wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define systems programming. If you mean could you write servers in it, then yes (there's a web stack for it already). If you want to write an OS kernel in Julia, then you probably could, but I'm not sure you'd want to.

There are times when having an English word for "no, well– yes, but I don't know why you'd want to" would be very useful. It'd have to be pretty short to save breath every time a computer scientist must answer the question, "But is it a systems programming language?"

Maybe 無 (mu) [0], which is something philosophically in between yes and no.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)#.22Unasking.22_t...

Re: A Lisper's first impression of Julia

#29

Post by PuercoPop »

LeonidasXIV wrote: post #9
wirrbel wrote: post #7

I would very much like to read a comparison of CL and Clojure from the author at some point. As it seems he is offering a fair comparison.

> I would very much like to read a comparison of CL and Clojure from the author at some point. As it seems he is offering a fair comparison. I suspect the authors main problem with Clojure is, that it is a mostly functional language which heavily emphasizes doing things in the functional way and discouraging imperative programming whereas CL is more like a true multiparadigm language. I used to think that multiparadi…

It is in poor taste to put words in someone's mouth and proceed to 'debunk' said words.

Re: A Lisper's first impression of Julia

#30

Post by klibertp »

> I would like to see something like Oberon’s support for renaming identifiers on import in some Lisp dialect someday

I couldn't find any specifics on how it's done in the linked PDF (modules are described at the end, 11 section), but I think both Clojure and Racket do this already. The `require` mini langauge in Racket is very rich and allows for prefixing, renaming, selective import of identifiers and so on: http://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/require.html#%28form._...

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