7 ms·

Computer scientist Viral Shah helped build Julia from Bengaluru, India

181 points by bootload 9y ago

plinkplonk 9y ago
I don't have an opinion on the 'built in Bangalore' part, but I know Viral (live in the same apartment block and run across him occasionally and talk tech) and can confirm he is quite the agent of change. In addition to being immensely talented of course. In a world of people trying to puff themselves up, Viral Shah is very understated and humble and flies somewhat under the radar. Good to see his contributions are getting more publicity.
- ViralBShah 9y ago
  Ravi, you are very kind as always!
- srean 9y ago
  ...and good to see you again. Just checked your comment history and it shows activity, but for some reason its been a long time sinc I ran into you a comment of yours.
trollpan2 9y ago
Why every Indian programmer has a burdon to prove that he/she is not an IT coolie ? How's is that less racist than some redneck assuming all black people are thugs ?
- saagarjha 9y ago
  > some redneck assuming I'm not sure that's less racist…
- ankit84 9y ago
  I am from Hyderabad, India and felt racist reading that title - "IT coolies". I believe the author just want to make headline. A lot of innovation happens that gets unnoticed in Silicon Valley or around the world. People here do not have access to mentorship & peer network so easily (openly available in California), still being self-motivated and connected by reading tech blogs, advises, etc. Just top of my head are following two examples. * Little Eye Labs => Facebook * HackerRank ==> YC
  - bootload 9y ago
    "I am from Hyderabad, India and felt racist reading that title - "IT coolies"." That's why I edit the titles, totally missed the point of innovation from a foreign hacker widely used in SV and around the world. Point proven.
  - digitalzombie 9y ago
    Perhaps OP is just trying to point out that talents aren't just in Silicon Valley. It can also be seen as a counter example against those other articles about how Indian programmers aren't qualify. I don't see it as a negative race baiting whatever but more as the above sentence (goto: sentence above).
- throwaway897932 9y ago
  Data is generally not "racist", it is what it is.
  - trollpan2 9y ago
    What data ?
kwk236 9y ago
Why can't people just settle on Python? Julia is going to die anyways in the near future.
- ankit84 9y ago
  I see Python fan following everywhere when there is a discussion on languages!! Someone is always there to defend :P
  - fellellor 9y ago
    Some time back, I saw an Ask HN post by someone who wanted to know how to become an evangelist for a language or a framework. I wonder if that's something that motivates comments in forums such as this.
- noam87 9y ago
  What makes you think that about Julia?
- ms013 9y ago
  The same reasons people migrated to Python in the late 90s from matlab, Fortran and C++: Python addressed pain points in those languages and ecosystems. Julia addresses deficiencies in Python the language. Unfortunately, it lacks the ecosystem: until it gets the rich library set that Python has, we're stuck with Python since ecosystem is arguably more important for practical traction than the base language.
  - vostok 9y ago
    I don't know how well it works, but Julia does let you use python libraries. @pyimport matplotlib.pyplot as plt x = linspace(0,2*pi,1000); y = sin(3*x + 4*cos(2*x)); plt.plot(x, y, color="red", linewidth=2.0, linestyle="--") plt.show() https://github.com/JuliaPy/PyCall.jl https://github.com/JuliaPy/PyCall.jl
    - ViralBShah 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
shriphani 9y ago
I know at least one YC fellowship co that was using Julia in production. There was like 1 evangelist at CMU who used it for their work. The deep learning wave kinda took things in a rather different direction.
bootload 9y ago
The original HN post in 2012. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3606380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3606380 / https://julialang.org/blog/2012/02/why-we-created-julia https://julialang.org/blog/2012/02/why-we-created-julia
yomritoyj 9y ago
As an Indian working in India, the 'in Bengaluru' part actually makes me a bit sad. While Shah may have physically been in India when he was working on Julia, the project might not have happened without his having gone to the US for graduate studies. I can't think of any comparable project started entirely by people working in India. The reason is not lack of ability: my guess is that at any time India's best institutions like the IITs or IISc have at least a hundred people who could build something like Julia. Instead it is perhaps India's poverty that prevents people from starting something that does not have an immediate academic or business payoff.
- goombastic 9y ago
  Given a choice between surviving and building something new, anyone would choose surviving. The red tape in India even now is atrocious. Recent raids on sales tax enforcers turned up corruption money in truckloads.
- codepie 9y ago
  It's true that these institutes haven't started something revolutionary, but there has been considerable amount of work in the right direction. I think there are multiple possible reasons behind it: 1) Most of the undergraduate students from these institutes either go study abroad or take up a job; which leaves only a fraction of the top students in these institutes. 2) Students who come for MS in these institutes have to clear GATE exam and most of them, according to what I have seen, join these institutes just for getting a good job and not for serious research. Disclaimer: I work at one of the top institutes you mentioned.
  - ViralBShah 9y ago
    Institutions are ultimately people and incentives. I have met with a number of researchers in these institutions where people are doing amazing research and I wish that they were able to contribute those advancements in the form of code in Julia. Even as we worked on Julia, we have been snubbed by some who think Julia is not real research, and had a hard time getting papers published. There is a larger issue of how open source foundational software gets developed and incentives for people who do that. Universities incentivize writing papers, not software, unfortunately. Eventually, it did work out and SIAM Review published our Julia paper. https://julialang.org/publications/julia-fresh-approach-BEKS.pdf https://julialang.org/publications/julia-fresh-approach-BEKS...
tigershark 9y ago
Reading this post it seems that Julia is the silver bullet for every programming problems (or at least the ones addressable in python). I guess it's not. It is just another (very useful, admittedly) tool for the job. I really can't stand when every new language or framework or technology or whatever tries to be THE silver bullet. How long it will be before we learn that such a thing doesn't exist and we are always going to learn new tools to solve problems in a hopefully more efficient way? Maybe in the future we'll have such a thing, but I bet my 2 pennies that it won't be either Julia or any of the existing languages. Edit: speaking specifically about the language I think that it's a very good effort and it can be only a good thing for the current languages ecosystem, even if I don't appreciate some of its idiosyncrasies.
- tigershark 9y ago
  The downvote without any whatsoever explanation is just the confirmation that nowadays the different languages/technologies are picked up mainly because of fanboysm/cargo cult rather than because they are useful for a very specific problem. It's easier to pickup whatever other people are choosing for themselves in the same way as it's easier just to press the downvote button without any explanation. Honestly this social side (upvote/downvote) leaves me quite sad thinking about the endless discussion that were triggered once upon a time and that nowadays are just becoming a war of upvotes/downvotes.
  - iamed2 9y ago
    I think the downvotes are probably because the article didn't actually talk about Julia that way. And Julia definitely expresses a target audience and target problem domain. As a member of the Julia community, I don't see people jumping on board because of "fanboyism". People come because they have a problem that Julia is suited to solve and they have been disappointed with the alternatives.
joericky233223 9y ago
It's a comparison between apples and oranges. If he is creating a language he is at least 10x guy and they are in high demand and don't have to bother about the things 1x devs have to worry about like... getting a job or getting financial stability. The problem is always with 1x guys taking jobs of another 1x guys from another nation.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- joericky233223 9y ago
  Simple economics when supply is in shortage demand increases. The shortage for 10x devs are so much that the worst a 10x guy from another country can do is reduce the salary of another 10x guy. But with the 1x guy it's a live or die situation, their job is in danger because 1x guys are too much in supply.
  - joe5644774 9y ago
    That's sad
norswap 9y ago
Alternative is the new black. Or maybe it is the new indie?
norswap 9y ago
Alternative is the new black. Or maybe it is the new indie?
throwaway897932 9y ago
Viral, how far away are we from a deep learning framework in Julia ? It looks like there are many streams, from GSoC mentoring proposal for what seemed like a CuDNN layer, to a LLVM backend for CUDA/SPIR-V. I figure it'll take atleast 2 years for things to stabilize.
- ViralBShah 9y ago
  I assume you are not speaking about MXNet.jl and TensorFlow.jl, which are really good, and in some ways, even better than the Python wrappers for those libraries. There are several pure Julia DL frameworks - Mocha.jl, KNet.jl and Merlin.jl. What will make things really exciting is native GPU codegen, which has recently landed in Julia, but will take some time to stabilize and make its way into these packages. We do have a deep learning workshop and a GPU workshop in this year's JuliaCon covering the state of the art and the way forward.
perseusprime11 9y ago
What kind of introduction is this? "In India, the formula for success is drilled into children from a very young age: get good grades, go to an elite Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), move to America, and never come back." So parents will drill this into their kids? Never come back?

181 points by bootload 9y ago

I don't have an opinion on the 'built in Bangalore' part, but I know Viral (live in the same apartment block and run across him occasionally and talk tech) and can confirm he is quite the agent of change. In addition to being immensely talented of course. In a world of people trying to puff themselves up, Viral Shah is very understated and humble and flies somewhat under the radar. Good to see his contributions are getting more publicity.

ViralBShah 9y ago
Ravi, you are very kind as always!
srean 9y ago
...and good to see you again. Just checked your comment history and it shows activity, but for some reason its been a long time sinc I ran into you a comment of yours.

trollpan2 9y ago

Why every Indian programmer has a burdon to prove that he/she is not an IT coolie ? How's is that less racist than some redneck assuming all black people are thugs ?

saagarjha 9y ago
> some redneck assuming I'm not sure that's less racist…
ankit84 9y ago
I am from Hyderabad, India and felt racist reading that title - "IT coolies". I believe the author just want to make headline. A lot of innovation happens that gets unnoticed in Silicon Valley or around the world. People here do not have access to mentorship & peer network so easily (openly available in California), still being self-motivated and connected by reading tech blogs, advises, etc. Just top of my head are following two examples. * Little Eye Labs => Facebook * HackerRank ==> YC
- bootload 9y ago
  "I am from Hyderabad, India and felt racist reading that title - "IT coolies"." That's why I edit the titles, totally missed the point of innovation from a foreign hacker widely used in SV and around the world. Point proven.
- digitalzombie 9y ago
  Perhaps OP is just trying to point out that talents aren't just in Silicon Valley. It can also be seen as a counter example against those other articles about how Indian programmers aren't qualify. I don't see it as a negative race baiting whatever but more as the above sentence (goto: sentence above).
throwaway897932 9y ago
Data is generally not "racist", it is what it is.
- trollpan2 9y ago
  What data ?

kwk236 9y ago

Why can't people just settle on Python? Julia is going to die anyways in the near future.

ankit84 9y ago
I see Python fan following everywhere when there is a discussion on languages!! Someone is always there to defend :P
- fellellor 9y ago
  Some time back, I saw an Ask HN post by someone who wanted to know how to become an evangelist for a language or a framework. I wonder if that's something that motivates comments in forums such as this.
noam87 9y ago
What makes you think that about Julia?
ms013 9y ago
The same reasons people migrated to Python in the late 90s from matlab, Fortran and C++: Python addressed pain points in those languages and ecosystems. Julia addresses deficiencies in Python the language. Unfortunately, it lacks the ecosystem: until it gets the rich library set that Python has, we're stuck with Python since ecosystem is arguably more important for practical traction than the base language.
- vostok 9y ago
  I don't know how well it works, but Julia does let you use python libraries. @pyimport matplotlib.pyplot as plt x = linspace(0,2*pi,1000); y = sin(3*x + 4*cos(2*x)); plt.plot(x, y, color="red", linewidth=2.0, linestyle="--") plt.show() https://github.com/JuliaPy/PyCall.jl https://github.com/JuliaPy/PyCall.jl
  - ViralBShah 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

shriphani 9y ago

I know at least one YC fellowship co that was using Julia in production. There was like 1 evangelist at CMU who used it for their work. The deep learning wave kinda took things in a rather different direction.

bootload 9y ago

The original HN post in 2012. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3606380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3606380 / https://julialang.org/blog/2012/02/why-we-created-julia https://julialang.org/blog/2012/02/why-we-created-julia

yomritoyj 9y ago

As an Indian working in India, the 'in Bengaluru' part actually makes me a bit sad. While Shah may have physically been in India when he was working on Julia, the project might not have happened without his having gone to the US for graduate studies. I can't think of any comparable project started entirely by people working in India. The reason is not lack of ability: my guess is that at any time India's best institutions like the IITs or IISc have at least a hundred people who could build something like Julia. Instead it is perhaps India's poverty that prevents people from starting something that does not have an immediate academic or business payoff.

goombastic 9y ago
Given a choice between surviving and building something new, anyone would choose surviving. The red tape in India even now is atrocious. Recent raids on sales tax enforcers turned up corruption money in truckloads.
codepie 9y ago
It's true that these institutes haven't started something revolutionary, but there has been considerable amount of work in the right direction. I think there are multiple possible reasons behind it: 1) Most of the undergraduate students from these institutes either go study abroad or take up a job; which leaves only a fraction of the top students in these institutes. 2) Students who come for MS in these institutes have to clear GATE exam and most of them, according to what I have seen, join these institutes just for getting a good job and not for serious research. Disclaimer: I work at one of the top institutes you mentioned.
- ViralBShah 9y ago
  Institutions are ultimately people and incentives. I have met with a number of researchers in these institutions where people are doing amazing research and I wish that they were able to contribute those advancements in the form of code in Julia. Even as we worked on Julia, we have been snubbed by some who think Julia is not real research, and had a hard time getting papers published. There is a larger issue of how open source foundational software gets developed and incentives for people who do that. Universities incentivize writing papers, not software, unfortunately. Eventually, it did work out and SIAM Review published our Julia paper. https://julialang.org/publications/julia-fresh-approach-BEKS.pdf https://julialang.org/publications/julia-fresh-approach-BEKS...

tigershark 9y ago

Reading this post it seems that Julia is the silver bullet for every programming problems (or at least the ones addressable in python). I guess it's not. It is just another (very useful, admittedly) tool for the job. I really can't stand when every new language or framework or technology or whatever tries to be THE silver bullet. How long it will be before we learn that such a thing doesn't exist and we are always going to learn new tools to solve problems in a hopefully more efficient way? Maybe in the future we'll have such a thing, but I bet my 2 pennies that it won't be either Julia or any of the existing languages. Edit: speaking specifically about the language I think that it's a very good effort and it can be only a good thing for the current languages ecosystem, even if I don't appreciate some of its idiosyncrasies.

tigershark 9y ago
The downvote without any whatsoever explanation is just the confirmation that nowadays the different languages/technologies are picked up mainly because of fanboysm/cargo cult rather than because they are useful for a very specific problem. It's easier to pickup whatever other people are choosing for themselves in the same way as it's easier just to press the downvote button without any explanation. Honestly this social side (upvote/downvote) leaves me quite sad thinking about the endless discussion that were triggered once upon a time and that nowadays are just becoming a war of upvotes/downvotes.
- iamed2 9y ago
  I think the downvotes are probably because the article didn't actually talk about Julia that way. And Julia definitely expresses a target audience and target problem domain. As a member of the Julia community, I don't see people jumping on board because of "fanboyism". People come because they have a problem that Julia is suited to solve and they have been disappointed with the alternatives.

joericky233223 9y ago

It's a comparison between apples and oranges. If he is creating a language he is at least 10x guy and they are in high demand and don't have to bother about the things 1x devs have to worry about like... getting a job or getting financial stability. The problem is always with 1x guys taking jobs of another 1x guys from another nation.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
joericky233223 9y ago
Simple economics when supply is in shortage demand increases. The shortage for 10x devs are so much that the worst a 10x guy from another country can do is reduce the salary of another 10x guy. But with the 1x guy it's a live or die situation, their job is in danger because 1x guys are too much in supply.
- joe5644774 9y ago
  That's sad

norswap 9y ago

Alternative is the new black. Or maybe it is the new indie?

norswap 9y ago

Alternative is the new black. Or maybe it is the new indie?

throwaway897932 9y ago

Viral, how far away are we from a deep learning framework in Julia ? It looks like there are many streams, from GSoC mentoring proposal for what seemed like a CuDNN layer, to a LLVM backend for CUDA/SPIR-V. I figure it'll take atleast 2 years for things to stabilize.

ViralBShah 9y ago
I assume you are not speaking about MXNet.jl and TensorFlow.jl, which are really good, and in some ways, even better than the Python wrappers for those libraries. There are several pure Julia DL frameworks - Mocha.jl, KNet.jl and Merlin.jl. What will make things really exciting is native GPU codegen, which has recently landed in Julia, but will take some time to stabilize and make its way into these packages. We do have a deep learning workshop and a GPU workshop in this year's JuliaCon covering the state of the art and the way forward.

perseusprime11 9y ago

What kind of introduction is this? "In India, the formula for success is drilled into children from a very young age: get good grades, go to an elite Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), move to America, and never come back." So parents will drill this into their kids? Never come back?