by KenoFischer on 2/14/22, 8:05 PM with 142 comments
by wiz21c on 2/14/22, 9:04 PM
- But the REPL lacks the ability to redefine structs on the go (which I can understand as it'd be tough to do, or simply not possible). But that, combined with the slow start up time makes life a bit harder than it should. Fortunately, one doesn't redefine its structs every day.
- There are also lots of libraries but the quality of the documentation is often sub par. For a newcomer like me, working examples would be great. For example, if you use the plots library, you'll have hard time finding a list of all possible plots (the documentation talks about lots of things, but strangely, not a list of possible charts). I've also looked at doing linear regression and GLM and, again, you've code libraries but the examples are rare...
- the startup time are still quite slow but that's ok because somehow you adapt your workflow around.
- being able to use greek symbols as identifiers is super cool but your editor as to manage that, else you'll have to memorize shortcuts...
But still, I keep on using it, it's much faster for my use case (data processing). I mean, faster than r or Python (for which I could write fast code but that'd mean I'd have to change the way it is written)
by socialdemocrat on 2/14/22, 9:30 PM
The normal thing today is comparing Julia to R, Matlab and Python. But my intro to Julia was actually trying to convert code examples in the O'Reilly book: "Exploring Everyday Things with R and Ruby: Learning About Everyday Things" to Julia.
I thought that worked quite nicely and that the Julia code looked a lot nicer than the Ruby code. It made me write a follow up blog post a few days later: https://assoc.tumblr.com/post/71454527084/cool-things-you-ca...
Unlike your typical Julia user I was always into programming because I wanted to make computer games. I liked playing with Game engine architectures and those exposed me to the problem of handling collision between objects of different types. Multiple-dispatch solves that problem very elegantly. Traditional object-oriented languages are pretty bad at it.
From the perspective of writing clean and expressive code, this really won me over to Julia early on before I had done much serious work with it.
It became my goto language for writing Unix tools, replacing Go, Ruby and Python.
by eigenspace on 2/14/22, 9:33 PM
It's not an overstatement to say that this language totally changed my relationship with computers and programming.
by KenoFischer on 2/14/22, 8:14 PM
by komuher on 2/14/22, 9:41 PM
Julia is getting usable even in "normal" applications not only academic stuff, as person who come back after 1.5/2 years to julia i feel like i can use it again in my job cause it is a lot more stable at have a lot of new neat futures + CUDA.jl is amazing.
I hope Julia team will still explore a bit more static type inference and full AOT compilation if language got full support for AOT it'll be a perfect deal for me :).
by memming on 2/14/22, 11:51 PM
by cube2222 on 2/14/22, 10:31 PM
Also, the way dynamic dispatch + specialization work is beautiful.
by pbohun on 2/15/22, 3:28 AM
The only change I would recommend is to have a way to distinguish between creating and setting a variable. Without this distinction it is very easy (especially for someone with dyslexia) to misspell a variable and accidentally create a new one instead of assigning a value. Something like this would be nice:
var x = 5
or even something like Go:
x := 5
by visviva on 2/15/22, 1:25 AM
It has made me objectively better at my job, and a much better programmer overall.
by stellalo on 2/14/22, 10:32 PM
by plafl on 2/15/22, 12:37 PM
I would guess there are some possibilities that could be a menace:
1. Someone manages to convince scientists to use a statically typed language.
2. Computing paradigm changes drastically. Everyone moves to quantum computing or similar.
3. In another 10 years someone learns from the lessons of Julia and improves on them to make a much better language.
by urthor on 2/15/22, 12:50 AM
As a replacement for Python, I've never understood the appeal, and it's probably not going to fill that niche. Still, as a replacement for Matlab/Mathematica, it's doing swimmingly.
All the best.
by dexterlagan on 2/15/22, 9:26 AM
by appleiigs on 2/14/22, 10:23 PM
by blindseer on 2/14/22, 11:24 PM
by streamofdigits on 2/15/22, 10:39 AM
But participating in that "hype" is not necessarily what will entrench julia for the long term. Turning its unique characteristics (unique versus these other two open source contestants, not across the entire programming language landscape) into unmissable developer / user experiences seems to me a safer route. E.g what makes R impossible to ignore is the richness of its statistical toolkit. What makes python impossible to ignore is the productivity boost for typical tasks etc.
by wodenokoto on 2/16/22, 6:10 AM
> There are so many places in math that are simply untouched because they sound like the domain of a compilers instead of "computational science", and I'm excited to see how the next 10 years bridges this gap in Julia.
https://www.julialang.org/blog/2022/02/10years/#chris_rackau...
by lmc on 2/15/22, 7:30 AM
I just read this book. Every page was like, 'wow'.
A couple of questions I had afterwards:
* I saw the DateTime type, but it doesn't seem to have a timezone - how do you deal with timezones?
* How is it to work with async code?
* It's a garbage collected language, what are some techniques to avoid performance pitfalls due to that?
If there's other Julia programmers around, any answers would be much appreciated!
by tkuraku on 2/15/22, 2:10 AM
by RyEgswuCsn on 2/14/22, 11:18 PM
by lenkite on 2/15/22, 7:23 AM
by lenkite on 2/15/22, 5:15 AM
by xiaodai on 2/14/22, 11:50 PM
* TTFP - this is the big one. Every thing is a sluggish sometimes * Sluggish IDE in VSCode; I am on Windows so start up is a bit of a pain i often have to wait 20+ s for it to become responsive * Non-robust Basic Data Science coverage e.g. GLM fails on some datasets that R can handle. So it's the only code in my workflow that still has R in it
by rnikander on 2/14/22, 11:10 PM
by AitchEmArsey on 2/15/22, 8:01 AM
by antifarben on 2/19/22, 10:14 AM
by pella on 2/14/22, 8:41 PM