4 ms·

I can understand how one can reasonably hypothesize that. In some sense you can see Julia as one big social experiment in what happens when you do everything po

I can understand how one can reasonably hypothesize that. In some sense you can see Julia as one big social experiment in what happens when you do everything possible to blur the line between users and developers of a scientific (and, of course, also general) programming language by solving the two language problem and making the language for users and developers one and the same. ... and it's been wildly successful. Some of the most prolific and talented contributors to Julia and its ecosystem are scientists by day and brilliant programmers of all kinds—crazy meta programmers, compiler hackers, generational GC writers, etc.—by night (as they say). During the keynote last night before tagging 1.0, we went through the history of major features in Julia's development history, it became a running theme that so many of these contributions have come from people who are physicists, chemists, geologists, biologists, etc. So I'd say that Julia is strong evidence that breaking down the separation between scientific users and developers of scientific libraries is a good idea.

ontouchstart 8y ago
I was watching live stream last night from the East coast and very impressed by the achievement by you scientists and grad students since 2012. https://arxiv.org/abs/1209.5145 https://arxiv.org/abs/1209.5145 As a former physicist, I have been through the Numerical Recipes/F77 stage myself two decades ago. In the age of Big Data and Machine Learning, there are many ways to harvest the creativities in people who are not trained as professional engineers. Our software development mindset should be extended beyond the industrial "task oriented" products and platforms. In the spirit of Turing machine and LISP where code is also data, we can even treat scientific computing ecosystems like Python/R/Julia etc. as models to capture creative scientific minds. It is AI at a high social level. The future is beyond our imagination. We need more crazy meta programmers.
- elcritch 8y ago
  That’s a great viewpoint, imho! Scientists in most fields have to write code nowadays, better to make it easier for them to hack together novel and useful tools.
- StefanKarpinski 8y ago
  > I was watching live stream last night from the East coast and very impressed by the achievement by you scientists and grad students since 2012. https://arxiv.org/abs/1209.5145 https://arxiv.org/abs/1209.5145 Thank you, that's very kind of you! To be fair, Jeff, Viral, Alan and I had many collective decades of industry experience interleaved with an equal amount of academia by the time we wrote that paper. And of course the academics are rather suspicious about just how academic we really are. > We need more crazy meta programmers. Hear, hear!

ontouchstart 8y ago

I was watching live stream last night from the East coast and very impressed by the achievement by you scientists and grad students since 2012. https://arxiv.org/abs/1209.5145 https://arxiv.org/abs/1209.5145 As a former physicist, I have been through the Numerical Recipes/F77 stage myself two decades ago. In the age of Big Data and Machine Learning, there are many ways to harvest the creativities in people who are not trained as professional engineers. Our software development mindset should be extended beyond the industrial "task oriented" products and platforms. In the spirit of Turing machine and LISP where code is also data, we can even treat scientific computing ecosystems like Python/R/Julia etc. as models to capture creative scientific minds. It is AI at a high social level. The future is beyond our imagination. We need more crazy meta programmers.

elcritch 8y ago
That’s a great viewpoint, imho! Scientists in most fields have to write code nowadays, better to make it easier for them to hack together novel and useful tools.
StefanKarpinski 8y ago
> I was watching live stream last night from the East coast and very impressed by the achievement by you scientists and grad students since 2012. https://arxiv.org/abs/1209.5145 https://arxiv.org/abs/1209.5145 Thank you, that's very kind of you! To be fair, Jeff, Viral, Alan and I had many collective decades of industry experience interleaved with an equal amount of academia by the time we wrote that paper. And of course the academics are rather suspicious about just how academic we really are. > We need more crazy meta programmers. Hear, hear!