5 ms·

Any thoughts on how it compares and will overcome the dominant enviromnent for technical programming, matlab?

2miles4chicken 11y ago
It's certainly faster: http://julialang.org/benchmarks/ http://julialang.org/benchmarks/. It is free/open source. And, it benefits from being a younger language and therefore has the hindsight of the quirks in Matlab's design. Coming from Python, the 1-indexed arrays are annoying but it's great for math.
- sghodas 11y ago
  The 1-indexed arrays can sometimes be nice, but I've run into bugs so many times when translating the code into a language with 0-indexed arrays.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    That's interesting, because the 1-indexed arrays are primary the primary reason I don't ever seriously consider using Julia (or Lua); I can only shudder and imagine the obnoxious number of off-by-one mistakes I'd make.
    - jernfrost 11y ago
      I think this is a mental block people have. I grew up on zero based arrays in C, but I can't say this has caused me any issues thus far using Julia. I don't know how it is for others but for me I just into this mode where I think about Julia as doing math and I know in math you start at 1 for vectors and matrices. Besides the way functions and APIs work, you seldom have to write code that really depends on the start index.
    - CyberDildonics 11y ago
      What you are saying is conjecture if you haven't tried Julia or Lua. The reality is that 1 based indexing is trivial compared to the difficulties of a complex program.
    - ced 11y ago
      Out of curiosity, assuming that Julia magically had 0-indexed arrays, what would you use it for?
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - matt4077 11y ago
      Yeah, it just feels wrong. Of course that's just habit and in fact starting counts at 1 is actually the more user-centric way of doing it. I wish I could get used to Julia but for some reason I just think the source looks..ugly. Maybe it's my dark past with php that makes me shudder at the sight of avg(x) (instead of x.avg). I know that's stupid (and the syntax is actually required for multiple dispatch). Maybe Julia and I should try couples' therapy.
    - Avshalom 11y ago
      On the other hand having cut my teeth programming in MATLAB and lua 1-based indexing is on of the things that endears Julia to me.
    - simonster 11y ago
      If I can switch between programming languages that use 0-based and 1-based indexing without getting confused, surely you could too. If you don't think that learning to use 1-based indexing is worth it, that's fair enough, but it's pretty low on my list of things that give me trouble when I translate code between languages.
    - jhbadger 11y ago
      Basically every mathematical/data science language uses 1-based arrays -- R, MATLAB, and Mathematica in addition to Julia. Probably because traditionally (and to a degree even now) the standard numerical language was FORTRAN.
ninjin 11y ago
What Julia really lacks at this moment is something along the lines of the Matlab IDE. The community is aware of this though and there is something in the works that even I, someone that lives happily with a ssh/tmux/vim set-up, would deem as interesting. Since we are on Hacker News, maybe I should also spread a rumour. MathWorks, allegedly, in a recent settled lawsuit added a condition stating that the other company was not to create any Julia bindings for its product. If this is true, which I have many reasons to believe, it is a major recognition of how at least MathWorks sees Julia as a real threat to the Matlab market share.
- bsilvereagle 11y ago
  > MathWorks sees Julia as a real threat to the Matlab market share I think Mathworks is feeling a lot of pressure from both Python & Julia. In the r2016a release of MATLAB, Mathworks essentially released a Jupyter (one of the first environments for Julia, and formerly iPython Notebooks) competitor with the 'Live Notebook'. Mathematica has had notebooks for quite a while, and the best Mathworks had was their MuPad suite. I think the prevalence of Jupyter definitely led to this development. http://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab/live-editor/ http://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab/live-editor/
  - jjoonathan 11y ago
    On the other side of things, are you aware of any efforts in the open source community to close the gap between jupyter and Mathematica notebooks (i.e. editing of pretty-printed math expressions)? I would really like to not give Stephen Wolfram money every year, but evidently not quite as much as I really like to be free of paragraph-form monospace code blobs from hell. I was hoping that MathJax meant I could wait a few years and have my cake and eat it too, but so far I haven't seen anything that looks serious :(
    - amk_ 11y ago
      LyX and TeXMacs can do that kind of thing through Maxima plugins. The Maxima frontend itself has some prettifying capabilities. Of course, if you aren't doing symbolic math that is going to be less useful to you. - http://www.texmacs.org/ http://www.texmacs.org/ - http://www.lyx.org/ http://www.lyx.org/ - http://maxima.sourceforge.net/ http://maxima.sourceforge.net/

It's certainly faster: http://julialang.org/benchmarks/ http://julialang.org/benchmarks/. It is free/open source. And, it benefits from being a younger language and therefore has the hindsight of the quirks in Matlab's design. Coming from Python, the 1-indexed arrays are annoying but it's great for math.

sghodas 11y ago
The 1-indexed arrays can sometimes be nice, but I've run into bugs so many times when translating the code into a language with 0-indexed arrays.
- tptacek 11y ago
  That's interesting, because the 1-indexed arrays are primary the primary reason I don't ever seriously consider using Julia (or Lua); I can only shudder and imagine the obnoxious number of off-by-one mistakes I'd make.
  - jernfrost 11y ago
    I think this is a mental block people have. I grew up on zero based arrays in C, but I can't say this has caused me any issues thus far using Julia. I don't know how it is for others but for me I just into this mode where I think about Julia as doing math and I know in math you start at 1 for vectors and matrices. Besides the way functions and APIs work, you seldom have to write code that really depends on the start index.
  - CyberDildonics 11y ago
    What you are saying is conjecture if you haven't tried Julia or Lua. The reality is that 1 based indexing is trivial compared to the difficulties of a complex program.
  - ced 11y ago
    Out of curiosity, assuming that Julia magically had 0-indexed arrays, what would you use it for?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - matt4077 11y ago
    Yeah, it just feels wrong. Of course that's just habit and in fact starting counts at 1 is actually the more user-centric way of doing it. I wish I could get used to Julia but for some reason I just think the source looks..ugly. Maybe it's my dark past with php that makes me shudder at the sight of avg(x) (instead of x.avg). I know that's stupid (and the syntax is actually required for multiple dispatch). Maybe Julia and I should try couples' therapy.
  - Avshalom 11y ago
    On the other hand having cut my teeth programming in MATLAB and lua 1-based indexing is on of the things that endears Julia to me.
  - simonster 11y ago
    If I can switch between programming languages that use 0-based and 1-based indexing without getting confused, surely you could too. If you don't think that learning to use 1-based indexing is worth it, that's fair enough, but it's pretty low on my list of things that give me trouble when I translate code between languages.
  - jhbadger 11y ago
    Basically every mathematical/data science language uses 1-based arrays -- R, MATLAB, and Mathematica in addition to Julia. Probably because traditionally (and to a degree even now) the standard numerical language was FORTRAN.

ninjin 11y ago

What Julia really lacks at this moment is something along the lines of the Matlab IDE. The community is aware of this though and there is something in the works that even I, someone that lives happily with a ssh/tmux/vim set-up, would deem as interesting. Since we are on Hacker News, maybe I should also spread a rumour. MathWorks, allegedly, in a recent settled lawsuit added a condition stating that the other company was not to create any Julia bindings for its product. If this is true, which I have many reasons to believe, it is a major recognition of how at least MathWorks sees Julia as a real threat to the Matlab market share.

bsilvereagle 11y ago
> MathWorks sees Julia as a real threat to the Matlab market share I think Mathworks is feeling a lot of pressure from both Python & Julia. In the r2016a release of MATLAB, Mathworks essentially released a Jupyter (one of the first environments for Julia, and formerly iPython Notebooks) competitor with the 'Live Notebook'. Mathematica has had notebooks for quite a while, and the best Mathworks had was their MuPad suite. I think the prevalence of Jupyter definitely led to this development. http://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab/live-editor/ http://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab/live-editor/
- jjoonathan 11y ago
  On the other side of things, are you aware of any efforts in the open source community to close the gap between jupyter and Mathematica notebooks (i.e. editing of pretty-printed math expressions)? I would really like to not give Stephen Wolfram money every year, but evidently not quite as much as I really like to be free of paragraph-form monospace code blobs from hell. I was hoping that MathJax meant I could wait a few years and have my cake and eat it too, but so far I haven't seen anything that looks serious :(
  - amk_ 11y ago
    LyX and TeXMacs can do that kind of thing through Maxima plugins. The Maxima frontend itself has some prettifying capabilities. Of course, if you aren't doing symbolic math that is going to be less useful to you. - http://www.texmacs.org/ http://www.texmacs.org/ - http://www.lyx.org/ http://www.lyx.org/ - http://maxima.sourceforge.net/ http://maxima.sourceforge.net/