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Why I'm Betting On Julia

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Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#231

Post by Pxtl »

east2west wrote: post #205
wirrbel wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are doing linear algebra, I agree. Yet linear algebra is not the only thing I want to do with numbers. I think most of the time I do use the elementwise operation, such as: x = linspace(0,10, 1000) y = (x Of course I can just use matrices and then I have the information at hand that I am doing linear algebra right now: x = matrix([[3, 0], [9, 5]]) Out[28]: matrix([[ 9, 0], [72, 25]]) x**2 + x I think this is n…

If multiply operator weren't such a big issue, the creators of Numpy wouldn't have attempted to insert a new operator for matrix multiplication into Python. For a dynamic language such as Python operator overloading for such closely related types is a big trouble. If I write a function that uses multiplication, either I use member methods such as "dot" or check for type explicitly, otherwise there is no guarantee wha…

This isn't intrinsic to Matrices vs Number-Arrays. The matrix-mulitplication issue is just a mathy version of the plus-as-sting-concat troubles ("Foo: " + 1 + 1 makes "Foo: 11" while 1 + 1 + " Foo" makes "2 Foo"). There are always holy wars about whether "+" should be string-concat because of that.

Both approaches have their merits.

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#232

Post by Stubb »

Pxtl wrote: post #50
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…

To be fair, there's also Python+NumPy and R in that space, not just Matlab. Besides the "tinker with LLVM" thing, what does Julia offer that Python (or Cython for speed)+NumPy does not?

Julia offers freedom from wondering whether you're betting on the wrong horse by coding for Python 2.7 or 3.x.

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#234

Post by bcj »

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

I think that would significantly increase the odds that my company moves from MATLAB (as one of the big arguments against is the lack of a good IDE), so yes, I would be incredibly interested in Julia support.

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#235

Post by coldtea »

exDM69 wrote: post #93
shele wrote: post #27

"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.

> "Julia was not designed by language geeks — it came from math, science, and engineering MIT students" This makes me a bit cautious about the language. Scientific computing people are often very smart but they are not programmers or computer scientists and may do funny things that a computer scientist would not. Like one based indexing of arrays in Julia. This is not a big deal but I'm a bit wary that there may be s…

>This makes me a bit cautious about the language. Scientific computing people are often very smart but they are not programmers or computer scientists and may do funny things that a computer scientist would not.

Most languages, from C and C++ to Python and Java were not created by "computer scientists".

Usually it's either programmers that studied math or came from some other profession (physicists, linguists like Larry Wall, even philosophers).

>Another example is the byte addressing of UTF-8 strings, which may give an error if you try to index strings in the middle of a UTF-8 sequence [1]. s = "\u2200 x \u2203 y"; s[2] is an error, instead of returning the second character of the string. I find this a little awkward.

That makes perfect sense if Julia cannot yet handle indexing strings on graphemes.

In essense, there is NO "second character" that you're getting when "byte indexing" a string. You might get one (if it's ascii all the way), or more possible you'll just get an invalid part of a character as a byte.

In other languages with similar limitations (like PHP) you get a broken result with no warning at all.

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#236

Post by iamed2 »

smortaz wrote: post #132
KenoFischer wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you using the IPython protocol for communication with python? If so, extending it to julia should be fairly straight forward.

we are for the integrated IPython REPL. but my question was more in terms of intellisense, debugging, profiling, mixed julia/C++ debugging, etc. ie, a fully integrated experience in VS.

The fully integrated experience you mention would do a lot for the Julia community in terms of gaining users tied to the GUI elements of MATLAB and VS for other languages. Integrated debugging and inspection in particular is a long-requested feature that has yet to see much attention.

Integrating with Pkg as Julia Studio does would be another important feature, as well as providing some sort of integrated plotting/graphics widget (a backend canvas along with plot navigation and image export, ideally supporting more than one of Julia's plotting backends).

I would certainly contribute to an alpha- or beta-testing effort :)

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#237

Post by otoburb »

sampo wrote: post #228
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 "…

Already in 2008 one of the R creators, Ross Ikaha, talked about how R is fundamentally slow and has inefficient memory use. And that a "next gen R" would be needed, and he was considering Common Lisp for the underlying language on compiler. See the "Back to the Future: Lisp as a Base for a Statistical Computing System". https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka/?Papers_and_Talks But now apparently Julia also fulfills Ih…

Lobbying Ross Ikaha to endorse Julia as the new R would hopefully bring more people over to the language. Instead of just the Matlab folks you would also renew interest with the slightly larger audience using R today.

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#238

Post by wirrbel »

Pxtl wrote: post #231
east2west wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If multiply operator weren't such a big issue, the creators of Numpy wouldn't have attempted to insert a new operator for matrix multiplication into Python. For a dynamic language such as Python operator overloading for such closely related types is a big trouble. If I write a function that uses multiplication, either I use member methods such as "dot" or check for type explicitly, otherwise there is no guarantee wha…

This isn't intrinsic to Matrices vs Number-Arrays. The matrix-mulitplication issue is just a mathy version of the plus-as-sting-concat troubles ("Foo: " + 1 + 1 makes "Foo: 11" while 1 + 1 + " Foo" makes "2 Foo"). There are always holy wars about whether "+" should be string-concat because of that. Both approaches have their merits.

I can rarely think of functions

    foo(arg)
where I would like to pass either strings or numbers that uses an operator + which polymorphically concats or performs addition. In this respect like languages that offer special string concatenating operators (like Haskell ++ or Lua with ..).

More generally: I think that + and * should always commute for the applied types and mixing them should follow the rules of associativity.

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#239

Post by wirrbel »

wirrbel wrote: post #150
StefanKarpinski wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If you are doing linear algebra, I agree. Yet linear algebra is not the only thing I want to do with numbers. I think most of the time I do use the elementwise operation, such as: x = linspace(0,10, 1000) y = (x Of course I can just use matrices and then I have the information at hand that I am doing linear algebra right now: x = matrix([[3, 0], [9, 5]]) Out[28]: matrix([[ 9, 0], [72, 25]]) x**2 + x I think this is n…

I meant non-commutative

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#240

Post by wirrbel »

wisty wrote: post #208
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…

There's two issues here: 1. A pretty significant amount of code is PHP serving broken HTML + Javascript, stuff which favours pragmatism over purity (to the degree that even some of the most pragmatic people hate it with a passion). These languages are popular because the authors focused on delivering results, not naval gazing. 2. When a language community starts talking up its the theoretical features with a passion,…

Your issue number 1 does actually (as I understand it) not apply to Julia, since it is actually really well designed and not tinkering. Matlab is the PHP of scientific computing ;)

About 2: The Haskell community is one of the friendliest I know, yet, it is one with the strictest theoretical background.

PHP was popular for a number of reasons, I think mostly because of the easy mix of HTML and PHP tags as well as the ready-to-run Apache/PHP/Mysql setup. From a maintainability standpoint, a lot of people suffer from this.

Its the same point that people have had about "Clean Code" and Unit tests. Some think it keeps them from getting work done. When a unit test of mine suddenly fails, I silently know, that some other person has just now also broken their code and does not know about this, will find out eventually but will not see why immediately. While they try to find their bug, I have already fixed mine and implemented tons of features in the time.

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