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They're going after Matlab, Octave and R rather than Python.

by Volt 9y ago

nnq 9y ago
That's why I think "they get things backwards" :| ...Python went after Matlab, Octave and R. And for ML/AI is almost completely replaced them. For stats and data-exploration it shares the pie with R because they are so different languages with different strengths. It's a shame that the best language designers seem to also be the worst at "market positioning" and programming languages a pretty much fashion & promotion driven area. Anyway, maybe I should shut up, find the time to delve into Julia and when I know enough try to give them a helping hand instead of whining...
- jononor 9y ago
  Python (as in the language designers or core people) did not "go after Matlab, Octave and R". Non-affiliated or loosely-affiliated people who wanted to do their data-oriented work in Python wrote a bunch of libraries, and the result after many years was a pretty competitive set of tools. So yeah, I think that similarly can be done for Julia to improve it for more general purpose tasks. In educational/academic setting, I think even more importantly for adoption than Python being a general-purpose language is that it is already relatively widely adopted in various industries as a tooling language. For good and bad, universities today are very keen on providing skills with immediate relevance to employeers. The same network effect is kinda what is keeping Matlab alive...
  - nnq 9y ago
    > more importantly for adoption than Python being a general-purpose language is that it is already relatively widely adopted in various industries as a tooling language. For good and bad, universities today are very keen on providing skills with immediate relevance to employeers Maybe I phrased it confusingly but you're saying the same things I thought. I don't mean "go after" in a conscious/targeted way. I meant "it evolved towards taking over". And "immediate relevance to employeers" is provided by being a "general purpose language" (like in "look, you can quickly wip up web apps, general server admin scrips and even excell plugins with it"). And "tooling" mostly equals "general purpose" in my book: there is no clear definition of "tooling" it's about "glue code" that needs to do "a bit of everything" to tie things together... so you need a "general purpose" language for tooling. (Now I see that maybe some people use "general purpose" as in "you can write anything from device drivers and OSs to web apps if you really want to" but this is "systems languages" in my terms or C and C++ and the newcomers Rust and D. But by this definition even Go would be very far from "general purpose"...)

They're going after Matlab, Octave and R rather than Python.

by Volt 9y ago

They're going after Matlab, Octave and R rather than Python.

nnq 9y ago

That's why I think "they get things backwards" :| ...Python went after Matlab, Octave and R. And for ML/AI is almost completely replaced them. For stats and data-exploration it shares the pie with R because they are so different languages with different strengths. It's a shame that the best language designers seem to also be the worst at "market positioning" and programming languages a pretty much fashion & promotion driven area. Anyway, maybe I should shut up, find the time to delve into Julia and when I know enough try to give them a helping hand instead of whining...

jononor 9y ago
Python (as in the language designers or core people) did not "go after Matlab, Octave and R". Non-affiliated or loosely-affiliated people who wanted to do their data-oriented work in Python wrote a bunch of libraries, and the result after many years was a pretty competitive set of tools. So yeah, I think that similarly can be done for Julia to improve it for more general purpose tasks. In educational/academic setting, I think even more importantly for adoption than Python being a general-purpose language is that it is already relatively widely adopted in various industries as a tooling language. For good and bad, universities today are very keen on providing skills with immediate relevance to employeers. The same network effect is kinda what is keeping Matlab alive...
- nnq 9y ago
  > more importantly for adoption than Python being a general-purpose language is that it is already relatively widely adopted in various industries as a tooling language. For good and bad, universities today are very keen on providing skills with immediate relevance to employeers Maybe I phrased it confusingly but you're saying the same things I thought. I don't mean "go after" in a conscious/targeted way. I meant "it evolved towards taking over". And "immediate relevance to employeers" is provided by being a "general purpose language" (like in "look, you can quickly wip up web apps, general server admin scrips and even excell plugins with it"). And "tooling" mostly equals "general purpose" in my book: there is no clear definition of "tooling" it's about "glue code" that needs to do "a bit of everything" to tie things together... so you need a "general purpose" language for tooling. (Now I see that maybe some people use "general purpose" as in "you can write anything from device drivers and OSs to web apps if you really want to" but this is "systems languages" in my terms or C and C++ and the newcomers Rust and D. But by this definition even Go would be very far from "general purpose"...)