Why I'm Betting On Julia

#1

Post by mistermcgruff » Thu, Jan 23, 2014, 6:21 PM UTC

Why I'm Betting On Julia
evanmiller.org

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#2

Post by mateuszb » Thu, Jan 23, 2014, 6:54 PM UTC

It's been done 55 years ago: http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/iiip/doc/CommonLISP/HyperSpec...

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#3

Post by tieTYT » Thu, Jan 23, 2014, 6:56 PM UTC

> my two concerns are 1) making it work and 2) making it fast.

What about maintainability? "Code as if the next guy to maintain your code is a homicidal maniac who knows where you live." -Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates

In my experience, making something work and making it (relatively) faster is easy. Making it easy to read is hard.

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#4

Post by sdegutis » Thu, Jan 23, 2014, 6:57 PM UTC

This sounds like premature-optimization to me.

Maybe it's just me, but in the apps I write in dynamic languages, the bottleneck is rarely in the language. It's usually in some IO.

EDIT: some sentence in the article gave me the impression he was using this for non-math-heavy stuff which is why I said this

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#5

Post by thinkpad20 » Thu, Jan 23, 2014, 6:58 PM UTC

I've tried Julia out a few times and been very impressed. From what I've seen it really does a great job of bridging the gap between easy-to-use and high-performance. It kind of seems like D in that way. I can definitely see lots of situations where a language like this is desirable.

I'm in Chicago (and a U of C grad!). I might come to the meetup if I can.

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#6

Post by cjfont » Thu, Jan 23, 2014, 6:58 PM UTC

> 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. I'm sure these things are great, but when I'm messing around with a new project for fun, my two concerns are 1) making it work and 2) making it fast. For me, code is like a car. It's a means to an end. The "expressiveness" of a piece of code is about as important to me as the "expressiveness" of a catalytic converter.

You want a fast car, but don't care much for having an aerodynamic design, hmmm..

EDIT: In retrospect I now think he means he wants to be able to create the project fast, and this is not about performance.

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#7

Post by thinkpad20 » Thu, Jan 23, 2014, 6:59 PM UTC

sdegutis wrote: post #4

This sounds like premature-optimization to me. Maybe it's just me, but in the apps I write in dynamic languages, the bottleneck is rarely in the language. It's usually in some IO. EDIT: some sentence in the article gave me the impression he was using this for non-math-heavy stuff which is why I said this

Julia's primary purpose is as a scientific language, which means lots of number-crunching on large data sets, complex computations, etc. IO is unlikely to be the bottleneck in these situations.

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#8

Post by tesmar2 » Thu, Jan 23, 2014, 6:59 PM UTC

> but it's poised to do for technical computing what Node.js is doing for web development

I stopped right there. Node.js has only a few great use cases where it shines and in the real world, the vast majority of shops have not switched to using it.

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#9

Post by tptacek » Thu, Jan 23, 2014, 6:59 PM UTC

cjfont wrote: post #6

> 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. I'm sure these things are great, but when I'm messing around with a new project for fun, my two concerns are 1) making it work and 2) making it fast. For me, code is like a car. It's a means to an end. The "expressiveness" of…

This is a confusing rebuttal, because cars have an aerodynamic design primarily for performance reasons, and Evan is very clear in this article that his primary concern is performance. I think you've misread him.

Re: Why I'm Betting On Julia

#10

Post by Mikeb85 » Thu, Jan 23, 2014, 7:00 PM UTC

tieTYT wrote: post #3

> my two concerns are 1) making it work and 2) making it fast. What about maintainability? "Code as if the next guy to maintain your code is a homicidal maniac who knows where you live." -Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates In my experience, making something work and making it (relatively) faster is easy. Making it easy to read is hard.

Often, especially with languages in the statistics, maths and scientific computing fields, you're only writing code for yourself and maybe 1 or 2 others. Everything you write is throwaway, or just functions that can be called and maintainability takes a second seat to ease of use for non-programmers writing code.