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Julia 1.0

julialang.org

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Re: Julia 1.0

#251

Post by celrod »

StefanKarpinski wrote: post #166
ChrisRackauckas wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For scientific computing, showing the package ecosystem is the most important thing. When you look at this thread, people are asking about dataframes and differential equations. Julia's site reflects this: yes there are things like Pandas, and for plotting, etc.

I do think we should add a code sample prominently on the page, however. I've always find it really frustrating when I look at a programming language and can't get a quick sense of how it looks. If a language looked like, say, APL, I'd be reluctant to use it even if it had an impressive ecosystem. Issue filed: https://github.com/JuliaLang/www.julialang.org/issues/115 .

Racket sounds like a really exciting language, but every time I look at some code...

Re: Julia 1.0

#252

Post by jhayward »

Accipitriform wrote: post #211
tavert wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason I ran away from Julia and don't plan on ever using it again, and don't recommend anyone use it outside of academia, is that so much of the community is made up of grad students. So you get a lot of research code and people who have never been professional programmers maintaining most of the ecosystem. Julia Computing is largely made up of people they've hired from the community straight out of grad school.

> Julia Computing is largely made up of people they've hired from the community straight out of grad school. Where do you think most companies get "professional programmers" from, exactly? Julia's been designed and implemented by some very bright people, and it shows.

Industry gets professional programmers by hiring people who have been hammering out shipping code in paying products for years, and years, doing support, maintenance, and new product development and research.

Grad students may be brilliant but that does not help give them any insight in to what makes a good ecosystem, toolchain, and feature set good.

Re: Julia 1.0

#253

Post by marmaduke »

srean wrote: post #247
marmaduke wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens for that scientist when they have to dive into Julia’a stack to debug something weird? In Python and C, you have established debuggers, semantics etc, which means that, yes, there are two languages instead of one, but neither is a moving target compared to a language which just had a 1.0 release. I get the issue with scientists writing poor code, but Numba has largely solved this problem, by packing an L…

> What happens for that scientist when they have to dive into Julia’a stack to debug something weird? The same things that happened when we had this conversation about what happens to the Fortran writing scientist when Python and Numpy came along, even at that time it wasnt the first time. I am sure it would not have been a whole lot different when a COBOL alternative had come along.

Not quite: the argument for Julia is that a casual user won’t drop down into C from Python for performance while in Julia it wouldn’t be necessary, thus easier.

Re: Julia 1.0

#254

Post by orhmeh09 »

ur-whale wrote: post #196
mikec3010 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, after they learn a programming language. I meant when we're children and taught to count, we don't start at 0.

Again assuming: that may be true in the place where you were educated.

If you look at ranks for worldwide sporting events , you’ll note that approximately none of them indicates first (zeroth ?) place with a 0. Can you give an example of a place where education at early childhood level is carried out as you claim ?

Re: Julia 1.0

#255

Post by [deleted] »

Accipitriform wrote: post #211
tavert wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason I ran away from Julia and don't plan on ever using it again, and don't recommend anyone use it outside of academia, is that so much of the community is made up of grad students. So you get a lot of research code and people who have never been professional programmers maintaining most of the ecosystem. Julia Computing is largely made up of people they've hired from the community straight out of grad school.

> Julia Computing is largely made up of people they've hired from the community straight out of grad school. Where do you think most companies get "professional programmers" from, exactly? Julia's been designed and implemented by some very bright people, and it shows.

[deleted]

Re: Julia 1.0

#256

Post by rhymenoceros »

vorpalhex wrote: post #118
29galoseats wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar reaction about this being a little premature. On the other hand, I'm wondering if this will help a little with the dependency hell that's caused me to drift away from Julia over the last year or so. At first I was fairly excited about Julia, and greatly preferred it over R or Python for numerical work, library resources aside. It was fast and I liked the language design itself. Over the last year or t…

Package management is a really-really-really difficult problem that is far from solved. Not to say that your critiques are invalid (quite the opposite), but Julia is just now hitting 1.0 - by contrast Node/NPM have been around quite a bit longer and still have terrible package issues they're working to solve. If you can, try and find a few hours to help pitch in and solve the package problems, even if it's just updat…

I know the JS ecosystem has some pretty counterproductive culture when it comes to package management (leftpad), but can you provide some examples of terrible issues still present in NPM? I hear this complaint often and I'm wondering what other people think of as insurmountable technical issues or design flaws in NPM.

Re: Julia 1.0

#257

Post by marmaduke »

celrod wrote: post #249
marmaduke wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens for that scientist when they have to dive into Julia’a stack to debug something weird? In Python and C, you have established debuggers, semantics etc, which means that, yes, there are two languages instead of one, but neither is a moving target compared to a language which just had a 1.0 release. I get the issue with scientists writing poor code, but Numba has largely solved this problem, by packing an L…

It'd probably be a lot easier to debug something somewhere in the Julia stack, than in the C/C++/Fortran code that many R libraries run through. My point with the rewrite was not garbage in, garbage out. It was that even though the original R code was using a library written in C, that library had to call a function he wrote in R millions of times. That R function being inherently slow is part of the problem. (The ea…

Optimization (or any gradient based algorithm) is a good use case for AD, but I don’t see why Julia’s approaches are any better than Python’s, eg autograd, theano, pytorch etc.

And sure that wouldn’t work with arbitrary Cython modules because Cython was designed as a Pythonic syntax over the Python C-API, and it just happened to become popular for numerical work.

I don’t think that’s a strong argument, though, because anything small enough to be usable with AD can be rewritten without too much time lost, whereas those massive Fortran routines with iterative algorithms wouldn’t produce useful gradients in any language.

Re: Julia 1.0

#258

Post by orhmeh09 »

ur-whale wrote: post #196
mikec3010 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, after they learn a programming language. I meant when we're children and taught to count, we don't start at 0.

Again assuming: that may be true in the place where you were educated.

Here’s some evidence that may explain the rarity of such a thing and how children struggle with the concept :

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.2044-835X....

Two studies are reported investigating children's conceptions of the number zero. The first, with 31/2–61/2‐year‐olds, charts preschoolers' understanding that zero is a number among other numbers with its own unique value, namely nothing. Children's achievement of this understanding occurred in three phases. At each phase understanding of zero lagged behind comparable understanding of other small numbers. The second study, with 51/2–10‐year‐olds, investigated children's developing conception of simple algebraic rules, such as a + 0 = a. Results showed that even the younger children had some understanding of several algebraic rules. The older children had acquired more such knowledge, but at all ages algebraic understanding was advanced for rules pertaining to zero, in comparison to those pertaining to other small numbers. These results suggest that zero plays a special role in children's increasingly algebraic knowledge of number. We conclude that since zero is difficult to conceive of and use originally (Expt 1) children develop special rules for its use, and that this provides a first step towards their formulation of more general algebraic rules (Expt 2) and towards an expanded conception of number and mathematics.

Re: Julia 1.0

#259

Post by jordigh »

stabbles wrote: post #113
JulianMorrison wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And imaginary is right out.

Maybe you could use complex numbers to index matrices

Story time!

When Octave was getting a lot of traffic from the first Coursera machine learning class, when it was just Andrew Ng doing a course and before the Coursera org existed, we were getting a lot of novice users who would do something like

    some_matrix(i,j) = 5
and get cryptic errors about how matrices cannot be indexed by complex numbers. This is because by default, in Matlab and Octave `i` and `j` are functions that evaluate to the imaginary unit. You have to overwrite the function names with `i=2, j=3` or whatever beforehand, which novices often forget. This was happening often enough that I pushed some patches to warn, "did you forget to assign i or j?" if someone tried to index matrices with complex numbers.

Point is, people in Matlab and Octave often unintentionally try to index by complex numbers.

Re: Julia 1.0

#260

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

jandrese wrote: post #108
peatmoss wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I hadn’t seen this before. The history of this feud goes back before C. Thank you for a fascinating read!

Even Dijkstra weighed in on this: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF

I believe that may be cited in the article (but its not in an obvious place :) )
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