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I agree that a language with Julia's goals needs to provide mutable vectors, matrices, etc. I just don't agree that these should be the most commonly used vers

I agree that a language with Julia's goals needs to provide mutable vectors, matrices, etc. I just don't agree that these should be the most commonly used versions, or the ones that a newcomer to Julia learns about first. Certainly, in my own work (admittedly in a different domain) I occasionally need a mutable map or set or list for some particular algorithm, but this is the relatively rare case. Most of the time, functional collections work just fine and make the algorithms more elegant rather than less so.

andyferris 9y ago
The most commonly used functions/methods are the non-mutating versions, that newcomers to Julia do learn about first. (The exception being assigning values to vectors and dictionaries using `setindex!`, as in `vector[i] = x` or `dict[key] = value`.) A lot of user code just uses functional methods on types which have the potential to be mutated. OTOH, library methods that are called by the user often involves optimized code that might be doing mutation internally but presents a functional interface, such as `sort(vector)` (which basically uses `sort!(copy(vector))` internally).