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I really enjoy Julia, and I see such amazing potential from it but I talk to so many people who hate it, or complain about it. I know most people haven't had th

I really enjoy Julia, and I see such amazing potential from it but I talk to so many people who hate it, or complain about it. I know most people haven't had the pleasure (/s) of programming in MATLAB and so some of decisions might not make sense, but that aside it's a damn good language. I really see Julia 'winning' in the longevity sense, but it makes me nervous sometimes seeing people misunderstand that. Do you think that similar misunderstandings have prevented Chapel and company from a more widespread success? Also, Erlang is fairly successful. According to Wikipedia, Chapel was started in 2009, and Erlang was around back then too, what does Chapel provide that obsoletes Erlang? What problem does DARPA think that Chapel/x10/etc could solve that Erlang couldn't?

EdwardCoffin 10y ago
Chapel and the other two languages were part of the HPCS project. An HPCS goal [was] to create a multi petaflop systems [1]. Erlang is not really the kind of language you can use to build such systems. It's not that Chapel (or the other two) 'obsolete' Erlang, it's that they were built with completely different goals in mind. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Productivity_Computing_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Productivity_Computing_Sy...
kem 10y ago
Newcomers approach a language from different places, and depending on where they're coming from, the same language can seem like a blessing or a curse. I love Julia--it's so thoughtfully constructed, incorporating parallelism as a fundamental, and expressive but performant. Compared to something like MATLAB or R, it solves all my problems. But for someone coming from Python or C, Julia can seem unnecessary and crippled by odd conventions. To someone used to the expressiveness and libraries of Python, why would you need Julia? To someone coming from C, which can do everything and is the speed standard, why would you need Julia? Languages do really serve different roles, but we often assume otherwise. That assumption is often implicit, though, which leads to discussions where people are talking past one another. I watched and toyed with all the HPCS languages for awhile, along with OCaml, and saw that they never got the traction I was hoping for, and none seemed to become something I could just use, practically speaking. Fortress was amazing in concept, but maybe bit off more than it could chew, at least with the support at hand and situation at Sun. Things seemed dormant for awhile, and then Julia showed up, which seemed like what everyone was looking for all along. Honestly, Stanza seems really promising as well, but I wonder if it's too late to the party (although I thought that about Python long ago as well and was obviously wrong about that).

EdwardCoffin 10y ago

Chapel and the other two languages were part of the HPCS project. An HPCS goal [was] to create a multi petaflop systems [1]. Erlang is not really the kind of language you can use to build such systems. It's not that Chapel (or the other two) 'obsolete' Erlang, it's that they were built with completely different goals in mind. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Productivity_Computing_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Productivity_Computing_Sy...

kem 10y ago

Newcomers approach a language from different places, and depending on where they're coming from, the same language can seem like a blessing or a curse. I love Julia--it's so thoughtfully constructed, incorporating parallelism as a fundamental, and expressive but performant. Compared to something like MATLAB or R, it solves all my problems. But for someone coming from Python or C, Julia can seem unnecessary and crippled by odd conventions. To someone used to the expressiveness and libraries of Python, why would you need Julia? To someone coming from C, which can do everything and is the speed standard, why would you need Julia? Languages do really serve different roles, but we often assume otherwise. That assumption is often implicit, though, which leads to discussions where people are talking past one another. I watched and toyed with all the HPCS languages for awhile, along with OCaml, and saw that they never got the traction I was hoping for, and none seemed to become something I could just use, practically speaking. Fortress was amazing in concept, but maybe bit off more than it could chew, at least with the support at hand and situation at Sun. Things seemed dormant for awhile, and then Julia showed up, which seemed like what everyone was looking for all along. Honestly, Stanza seems really promising as well, but I wonder if it's too late to the party (although I thought that about Python long ago as well and was obviously wrong about that).