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I really like Julia overall but I'm undecided whether it's good as a general purpose language. Right now I'm working on a few-thousands-lines-of-code project an

I really like Julia overall but I'm undecided whether it's good as a general purpose language. Right now I'm working on a few-thousands-lines-of-code project and sometimes wish Julia was more like Swift: - Writing code with Nullables is cumbersome and verbose compared to Swift. - The object.method() notation is sometimes more readable, especially in more complex expression. Plus, in an IDE it works well with completion. - The ordering of types in a file matters. - Overall, Swift code looks a tiny bit more readable, cleaner. - No interfaces.

tomsthumb 9y ago
My company decided to used Julia as a general purpose language for a number of projects around 2.5-1.5 years ago (I’ve been there 18 months). I firmly believe this choice had an opportunity cost somewhere in the 1-2M $ range for a sub 25 person company. The number of bugs in the language, which had no doubt since improved, and the lack of libraries, which leads to serious NIH (b/c really it’s just NI yet) was costly, and frankly dangerous in the context of security, and then generally with regards to reproducibility. At one point we had a tool which leaned heavily on macros and required a version of the language which no one no longer had on heir machine and had no download links on the internet anywhere. Luckily they are consistent in their version uploads and altering the download address to have that version happened to line up with what’s in their server, but running a company in something like that is tenuous at best.
jernfrost 9y ago
I get what you mean, but I kind of miss the other when working with one. For larger code bases Swift feels "safer", but Julia tends to feel more enjoyable and fast to try out things with. But yeah I REALLY wish the Julia guys can come up with a nice way of dealing with Nullable. But I actually don't miss the `object.method()` notation. I find it is so much more straightforward to compose things functionally when everything is a plain function. I feel methods just adds complexity to a language. For readability I tend to use the form `x |> f |> g |> h` if I need to make it easier to read a call like `h(g(f(x)))`. I agree completion is a bit nicer with `object.method()` but function completion works quite well in the REPL and Juno. I use `methodswith()` to locate relevant functions for a type. In some ways I think it is actually easier to deal with than in Swift, as Swift base classes have so many methods you can't find the stuff you are interested in quickly. I have kind of wanted Swift to be the solution for everything, but I see that the API design philosophy for Swift makes it difficult to turn it into a language which is as nice for data science as Julia. There is no focus on making stuff like matrix classes, multidimensional arrays, shell integration etc. Also I don't quite like that Swift ties me so much to an IDE. Writing Swift code with a plain text editor and a REPL isn't as nice as doing it with Julia.

tomsthumb 9y ago

My company decided to used Julia as a general purpose language for a number of projects around 2.5-1.5 years ago (I’ve been there 18 months). I firmly believe this choice had an opportunity cost somewhere in the 1-2M $ range for a sub 25 person company. The number of bugs in the language, which had no doubt since improved, and the lack of libraries, which leads to serious NIH (b/c really it’s just NI yet) was costly, and frankly dangerous in the context of security, and then generally with regards to reproducibility. At one point we had a tool which leaned heavily on macros and required a version of the language which no one no longer had on heir machine and had no download links on the internet anywhere. Luckily they are consistent in their version uploads and altering the download address to have that version happened to line up with what’s in their server, but running a company in something like that is tenuous at best.

jernfrost 9y ago

I get what you mean, but I kind of miss the other when working with one. For larger code bases Swift feels "safer", but Julia tends to feel more enjoyable and fast to try out things with. But yeah I REALLY wish the Julia guys can come up with a nice way of dealing with Nullable. But I actually don't miss the `object.method()` notation. I find it is so much more straightforward to compose things functionally when everything is a plain function. I feel methods just adds complexity to a language. For readability I tend to use the form `x |> f |> g |> h` if I need to make it easier to read a call like `h(g(f(x)))`. I agree completion is a bit nicer with `object.method()` but function completion works quite well in the REPL and Juno. I use `methodswith()` to locate relevant functions for a type. In some ways I think it is actually easier to deal with than in Swift, as Swift base classes have so many methods you can't find the stuff you are interested in quickly. I have kind of wanted Swift to be the solution for everything, but I see that the API design philosophy for Swift makes it difficult to turn it into a language which is as nice for data science as Julia. There is no focus on making stuff like matrix classes, multidimensional arrays, shell integration etc. Also I don't quite like that Swift ties me so much to an IDE. Writing Swift code with a plain text editor and a REPL isn't as nice as doing it with Julia.