7 ms·

A review of the Julia language (2014)

37 points by patagonia 8y ago

pieterr 8y ago
Previous discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8809422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8809422
danysdragons 8y ago
The article argues that while the language is way cool in principle, the current implementation is bug-ridden and has poor error-handling. But as the HN title acknowledges, the article was written in 2014, when the Julia version was only 0.4. Since then it's been four years, and Julia only recently hit 1.0. It would be much more interesting to see an article discussing the current state of the language.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jjoonathan 8y ago
  I used Julia for my thesis work in 2015 and also came away with "nice, but dealbreaking bugs, two in particular." They were both fixed by 2016. Julia is moving way too fast for a years-old opinion to mean much.
- eigenspace 8y ago
  I've been using Julia seriously for the last year and I'm absolutely loving it. The language is beatiful, elegant and fast and the community has been nothing but friendly, helpful and welcoming to me. I think its a real shame this out of date grievance article is being dredged up again giving people a myopic view of what Julia 0.4 may have been like in 2014 when its now 2018 and we have v1.0.
- ChrisRackauckas 8y ago
  Most people using Julia today weren't using Julia in 2014 because we didn't think it was ready. That should tell you how relevant Julia v0.4 is to modern Julia.
FridgeSeal 8y ago
This is hella outdated. The language has changed (for the better) soo much since 2014. I'm sure there's more up-to-date reviews that could be more useful...
- deathtrader666 8y ago
  Could you please point to some newer reviews that you trust? I'm trying to get a sense for myself whether I should invest my time learning Python or Julia.
  - nnq 8y ago
    > Python or Julia ...replace that "or" with an "and". Python is unavoidable, and it makes no sense not to become proficient at it unless you already know another language usable also as a "systems scripting language" (eg. Ruby or Perl).
    - ced 8y ago
      Depends what you do. In science, lots of people learn only Matlab, and Julia can be a solid/superior replacement, depending on the problem space.
FlorianRappl 8y ago
I would really love to see what happened since the article, since I, personally, stopped using Julia around the same time (unrelated to the article) and only followed the announcements (e.g., of hitting the 1.0 milestone). I would love to know if the outside view ("it improved / matured a lot") is the true story.
- ChrisRackauckas 8y ago
  Julia seems to be quite different. I will say "seems" since it can be hard to find someone who's been around since v0.4: most people joined the community long after. 2016 had a "third generation" of Julia developers join in, and there's a been a boom in the package ecosystem around that with high retention rates from GSoC.
npr11 8y ago
Beyond the state of the Julia Language (which I am excited to try out since 1.0), the core community comes off really badly in this post, and the previous follow-up discussion on HN [1], and julia-users group [2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8809422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8809422 [2] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/julia-users/GyH8nhExY9I https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/julia-users/GyH8nhEx...
- attractivechaos 8y ago
  IMHO, one of the worst things Julia had done was to unnecessarily break so many backward compatibilities (e.g. renaming shift!() to popfirst!() – who cares? and how many user code this will break!). As a result, a great portion, if not the majority, of Julia tutorials online are not applicable to the latest version any more. This leads to a lot of headaches when you learn Julia. I know v1.0 is supposed to be stable, but their track of record makes me doubt. I will see what they do to v1.1 and then decide if it is worth learning.
  - stabbles 8y ago
    Julia uses semantic versioning now, so there's a guarantee there will be no breaking changes.
    - Chyzwar 8y ago
      They can make breaking changes in every major release. Angular 2,4,5,6 versions were released in the span of just two years.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - ViralBShah 8y ago
    1.1 will not be breaking. The next release with breaking changes will be 2.0 and we expect it will be a while before we do that. In terms of names, we do care a fair bit in trying to pick intuitive names that clearly communicate what a function will do. FemtoCleaner also will auto update your code for these breaking changes, by making a pull request to your repo.
shele 8y ago
It is the year 2048. A hacker news veteran presses enter to fulfill her duty and reposts the sad story about Dan Luu and the Julia community. A greyed Stefan Karpinski tries to object but his statement disappears behind thousands of Dijkstra postings. In the distance the voice of the zealots, chanting 1-based, 1-based...
- ModernMech 8y ago
  I don't understand this. Please elaborate.
  - shele 8y ago
    Controversies about this blog post and about Julia's 1-based arrays on HN often replace serious discussion about the programming language. Stefan Karpinski is one of the inventors of Julia, Dijkstra wrote a classic note in favour of 0-based indexing.
    - ModernMech 8y ago
      Thanks!
  - stabbles 8y ago
    The joke is that criticism of Julia is always the same: (1) Dan Luu's bad experiences in 2014, (2) some "giving up on Julia" blog post from 2016, or (3) bikeshedding about 1-based indexing. And when the discussion revolves around 1-based indexing, Dijkstra is almost always cited to prove objective superiority of 0-based indexing.
    - ModernMech 8y ago
      Thank you. So much inside knowledge rolled up! Culture context is important :)
  - czep 8y ago
    In math when we write a sum, we say "sum from i = 1 to n", not "sum from i = 0 to n-1". Zero-based indexing of arrays makes sense in a language like C where arrays are just pointers and offsets are determined with arithmetic on pointer addresses in memory. This is why we are trained to write code like "for (i = 0; i < n; i++)". But in Julia where one of the stated purposes is to be able to write code that looks like formulae, it is far more natural to use one-based indexing.
czep 8y ago
Julia holds a lot of promise: the next 5 years will determine whether it can deliver on its quest to solve the two language problem. Over the past few weeks I've been evaluating Julia as a potential R replacement. IMO, it's definitely not there yet. I've run into bugs, crashes, hangs, sluggish performance, packages that won't load in 1.0, a clunky REPL, and a lot of code that I can't trust has been as well peer reviewed as what's in Base R. It'll take me a couple months but I plan to write a blog post on my experience, and I'm no Dan Luu ;) That said I like the design of Julia, and the mission or promise as I call it could eventually make Julia an R replacement (as well as a replacement for lots of other languages). I started using R in 2001-ish, and at the time I remember thinking no way would I switch to R from SAS. Today I laugh at that, but that's the difference that 15 years will make. Julia is still very young. It's advantage is the modern design. R is entrenched and robust, but let's face it, it's design is ancient, rooted in the Fortran-and-card-punch era, and there are things (eg. multithreaded) it will never do. Julia is at a crossroads: the core developers are eager to listen to the community. Whether the devs can maintain grasp of their vision while still delivering what the community wants is yet to be seen. They're being pulled in a thousand different directions, based on everyone's desire for what they want out of Julia. This could end up a disaster if the devs don't stick to their vision. Even though it's not good enough to replace R for my daily work right now, I plan to keep using Julia and contributing, because in 5, 10, 15 years, perhaps I will feel about R the way I feel about SAS today.
- siproprio 8y ago
  Recently, I tried to install JuliaPro on my computer, to play with it, see what it is about. I couldn't complete the installation, it gave a weird error "windows cannot find -v". Nothing came up on forums or the internet, so I gave up on trying to learn Julia.
- mkborregaard 8y ago
  An important thing that many people fail to realise is that Julia-1.0 came as a surprise to package authors as well, and thus the first month of the the release has been a scramble to get everything working on 1.0. Unfortunately the pre-1.0 package manager did not have good facilities for upper bounding versions - so essentially everybody's packages would install on 1.0 but be broken. At exactly the same time, a lot of people thought "hey, 1.0 time to check out this new language", and would experience all those crashes. Doing a review of Julia based on the experience in the first month after 1.0 will be grossly misleading. I've used the language progressively more for the last 3 years, and also teach a university R course, so I have some experience to base that claim on.
FranzFerdiNaN 8y ago
I have really no clue why a post from 2014, discussing the language at 0.4, is being posted again and also upvoted.
- swdunlop 8y ago
  The only value I see is reminding people how much Julia has improved since 2014.
  - ModernMech 8y ago
    There's a lot of value here for anyone who does language design and development. It's important to see the challenges early language projects face, how users respond to them, and how the community responds in turn. If you examine this piece not from a perspective of the language wars or a language user, but from a perspective of "What can this tell us about what challenges early languages face" then this is a very good article. At its core, this article is about someone who was interested in a language, used it enough to find many bugs, found the motivation to write a blog post about it, and the community and devs responded in good and not so good ways. For the right reader (early-stage language devs) this is a great resource. It's like an archaeologist uncovering a 10,000 year old pot. Sure it's not relevant to most users of pots today, but makers of pots could maybe learn something from it.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

37 points by patagonia 8y ago

Previous discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8809422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8809422

The article argues that while the language is way cool in principle, the current implementation is bug-ridden and has poor error-handling. But as the HN title acknowledges, the article was written in 2014, when the Julia version was only 0.4. Since then it's been four years, and Julia only recently hit 1.0. It would be much more interesting to see an article discussing the current state of the language.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jjoonathan 8y ago
I used Julia for my thesis work in 2015 and also came away with "nice, but dealbreaking bugs, two in particular." They were both fixed by 2016. Julia is moving way too fast for a years-old opinion to mean much.
eigenspace 8y ago
I've been using Julia seriously for the last year and I'm absolutely loving it. The language is beatiful, elegant and fast and the community has been nothing but friendly, helpful and welcoming to me. I think its a real shame this out of date grievance article is being dredged up again giving people a myopic view of what Julia 0.4 may have been like in 2014 when its now 2018 and we have v1.0.
ChrisRackauckas 8y ago
Most people using Julia today weren't using Julia in 2014 because we didn't think it was ready. That should tell you how relevant Julia v0.4 is to modern Julia.

FridgeSeal 8y ago

This is hella outdated. The language has changed (for the better) soo much since 2014. I'm sure there's more up-to-date reviews that could be more useful...

deathtrader666 8y ago
Could you please point to some newer reviews that you trust? I'm trying to get a sense for myself whether I should invest my time learning Python or Julia.
- nnq 8y ago
  > Python or Julia ...replace that "or" with an "and". Python is unavoidable, and it makes no sense not to become proficient at it unless you already know another language usable also as a "systems scripting language" (eg. Ruby or Perl).
  - ced 8y ago
    Depends what you do. In science, lots of people learn only Matlab, and Julia can be a solid/superior replacement, depending on the problem space.

FlorianRappl 8y ago

I would really love to see what happened since the article, since I, personally, stopped using Julia around the same time (unrelated to the article) and only followed the announcements (e.g., of hitting the 1.0 milestone). I would love to know if the outside view ("it improved / matured a lot") is the true story.

ChrisRackauckas 8y ago
Julia seems to be quite different. I will say "seems" since it can be hard to find someone who's been around since v0.4: most people joined the community long after. 2016 had a "third generation" of Julia developers join in, and there's a been a boom in the package ecosystem around that with high retention rates from GSoC.

npr11 8y ago

Beyond the state of the Julia Language (which I am excited to try out since 1.0), the core community comes off really badly in this post, and the previous follow-up discussion on HN [1], and julia-users group [2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8809422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8809422 [2] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/julia-users/GyH8nhExY9I https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/julia-users/GyH8nhEx...

attractivechaos 8y ago
IMHO, one of the worst things Julia had done was to unnecessarily break so many backward compatibilities (e.g. renaming shift!() to popfirst!() – who cares? and how many user code this will break!). As a result, a great portion, if not the majority, of Julia tutorials online are not applicable to the latest version any more. This leads to a lot of headaches when you learn Julia. I know v1.0 is supposed to be stable, but their track of record makes me doubt. I will see what they do to v1.1 and then decide if it is worth learning.
- stabbles 8y ago
  Julia uses semantic versioning now, so there's a guarantee there will be no breaking changes.
  - Chyzwar 8y ago
    They can make breaking changes in every major release. Angular 2,4,5,6 versions were released in the span of just two years.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- ViralBShah 8y ago
  1.1 will not be breaking. The next release with breaking changes will be 2.0 and we expect it will be a while before we do that. In terms of names, we do care a fair bit in trying to pick intuitive names that clearly communicate what a function will do. FemtoCleaner also will auto update your code for these breaking changes, by making a pull request to your repo.

shele 8y ago

It is the year 2048. A hacker news veteran presses enter to fulfill her duty and reposts the sad story about Dan Luu and the Julia community. A greyed Stefan Karpinski tries to object but his statement disappears behind thousands of Dijkstra postings. In the distance the voice of the zealots, chanting 1-based, 1-based...

ModernMech 8y ago
I don't understand this. Please elaborate.
- shele 8y ago
  Controversies about this blog post and about Julia's 1-based arrays on HN often replace serious discussion about the programming language. Stefan Karpinski is one of the inventors of Julia, Dijkstra wrote a classic note in favour of 0-based indexing.
  - ModernMech 8y ago
    Thanks!
- stabbles 8y ago
  The joke is that criticism of Julia is always the same: (1) Dan Luu's bad experiences in 2014, (2) some "giving up on Julia" blog post from 2016, or (3) bikeshedding about 1-based indexing. And when the discussion revolves around 1-based indexing, Dijkstra is almost always cited to prove objective superiority of 0-based indexing.
  - ModernMech 8y ago
    Thank you. So much inside knowledge rolled up! Culture context is important :)
- czep 8y ago
  In math when we write a sum, we say "sum from i = 1 to n", not "sum from i = 0 to n-1". Zero-based indexing of arrays makes sense in a language like C where arrays are just pointers and offsets are determined with arithmetic on pointer addresses in memory. This is why we are trained to write code like "for (i = 0; i < n; i++)". But in Julia where one of the stated purposes is to be able to write code that looks like formulae, it is far more natural to use one-based indexing.

czep 8y ago

Julia holds a lot of promise: the next 5 years will determine whether it can deliver on its quest to solve the two language problem. Over the past few weeks I've been evaluating Julia as a potential R replacement. IMO, it's definitely not there yet. I've run into bugs, crashes, hangs, sluggish performance, packages that won't load in 1.0, a clunky REPL, and a lot of code that I can't trust has been as well peer reviewed as what's in Base R. It'll take me a couple months but I plan to write a blog post on my experience, and I'm no Dan Luu ;) That said I like the design of Julia, and the mission or promise as I call it could eventually make Julia an R replacement (as well as a replacement for lots of other languages). I started using R in 2001-ish, and at the time I remember thinking no way would I switch to R from SAS. Today I laugh at that, but that's the difference that 15 years will make. Julia is still very young. It's advantage is the modern design. R is entrenched and robust, but let's face it, it's design is ancient, rooted in the Fortran-and-card-punch era, and there are things (eg. multithreaded) it will never do. Julia is at a crossroads: the core developers are eager to listen to the community. Whether the devs can maintain grasp of their vision while still delivering what the community wants is yet to be seen. They're being pulled in a thousand different directions, based on everyone's desire for what they want out of Julia. This could end up a disaster if the devs don't stick to their vision. Even though it's not good enough to replace R for my daily work right now, I plan to keep using Julia and contributing, because in 5, 10, 15 years, perhaps I will feel about R the way I feel about SAS today.

siproprio 8y ago
Recently, I tried to install JuliaPro on my computer, to play with it, see what it is about. I couldn't complete the installation, it gave a weird error "windows cannot find -v". Nothing came up on forums or the internet, so I gave up on trying to learn Julia.
mkborregaard 8y ago
An important thing that many people fail to realise is that Julia-1.0 came as a surprise to package authors as well, and thus the first month of the the release has been a scramble to get everything working on 1.0. Unfortunately the pre-1.0 package manager did not have good facilities for upper bounding versions - so essentially everybody's packages would install on 1.0 but be broken. At exactly the same time, a lot of people thought "hey, 1.0 time to check out this new language", and would experience all those crashes. Doing a review of Julia based on the experience in the first month after 1.0 will be grossly misleading. I've used the language progressively more for the last 3 years, and also teach a university R course, so I have some experience to base that claim on.

FranzFerdiNaN 8y ago

I have really no clue why a post from 2014, discussing the language at 0.4, is being posted again and also upvoted.

swdunlop 8y ago
The only value I see is reminding people how much Julia has improved since 2014.
- ModernMech 8y ago
  There's a lot of value here for anyone who does language design and development. It's important to see the challenges early language projects face, how users respond to them, and how the community responds in turn. If you examine this piece not from a perspective of the language wars or a language user, but from a perspective of "What can this tell us about what challenges early languages face" then this is a very good article. At its core, this article is about someone who was interested in a language, used it enough to find many bugs, found the motivation to write a blog post about it, and the community and devs responded in good and not so good ways. For the right reader (early-stage language devs) this is a great resource. It's like an archaeologist uncovering a 10,000 year old pot. Sure it's not relevant to most users of pots today, but makers of pots could maybe learn something from it.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]