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Please don't vilify Python or R thinking that will help with Julia's adoption or popularity. If Julia is as awesome as its evangelists say, it will gracefully d

Please don't vilify Python or R thinking that will help with Julia's adoption or popularity. If Julia is as awesome as its evangelists say, it will gracefully displace its competitors without the need of a smear campaign

b_tterc_p 8y ago
You seem to be suggesting it’s not fair to make superior comparisons to python until Julia has mainstream popularity. That’s rubbish. Python is much less expressive.
lenticular 8y ago
Python does have excellent libraries and it fits many people's mental model of programming, but not mine. I still use it often. However, for a dynamic language, it is simply not very expressive. It has no multi-line lambdas, OO syntax that I find a bit awkward, and some other limitations. These can be seen as advantages, since they enforce the "there's only one way to do it" philosophy, but that doesn't work for me.
dman 8y ago
Wish advocates of all new languages stuck with this principle.
- lenticular 8y ago
  I wasn't being disrespectful of Python. We are allowed to criticize languages. The fact is, by any reasonable measure, Julia is more expressive than Python, which was all I stated. This is an advantage of Julia. Both languages have advantages and disadvantages, and comparing them honestly is necessary for people to make a good choice when selecting a language for a project. C is less expressive than Python or Julia, but no one would say C is a bad language based on that. And no C programmer would disagree with that statement. It's not about putting any language or community down. By your argument, it sounds like we cannot talk about any advantages a new language may have over existing ones. If we stuck to that, how could we possibly make any argument over why one may want to select a newer language?
  - xiaodai 8y ago
    Can you give concrete examples of where Julia is more expressive than Python? I can think of defining custom units https://medium.com/@Jernfrost/defining-custom-units-in-julia-and-python-513c34a4c971 https://medium.com/@Jernfrost/defining-custom-units-in-julia...
    - lenticular 8y ago
      I give examples of expressivity in my comment above. The multiple dispatch is completely ubiquitous in Julia, being the default. This allows for the definition of flexible and extensible interfaces similar to Haskell's typeclasses. Macros are used to make things like PyCall or generate fast and flexible CUDA code. This is not easily possible in Python, especially not with high performance.
eigenspace 8y ago
Criticisms of languages should not be taken as criticisms of their creators or users. I don't see anything wrong with saying "Language X does Y better than language Z in my use cases." Languages are toolsets and programmers are always looking for appropriate tools for a given task. It seems crazy to demand that people not be able to talk honestly about their experiences using a given tool. Python doesn't have feelings, it won't be sad if you don't like it.
- xiaodai 8y ago
  Even if it does, what's wrong with stating an opinion? Why does an honest opinion have to be branded "smear"?
hpcjoe 8y ago
Hmm ... I remember when Perl was king and Python was the shiny new thing. I watched Python supporters belittle Perl as "line noise" and other quite silly descriptions. They were all proud of "there is only one way do to it" versus the linguistic Perl way of "there is more than one way to do it." I am experiencing something of a sense of schadenfreude over defense of Python against a newcomer. 20 years on, Perl is still in widespread use, still unbeatable for its growing use cases. I don't wish to speculate where Python will be 20 years from now. I do know that Fortran will still be around. That's about the only sure thing.

b_tterc_p 8y ago

You seem to be suggesting it’s not fair to make superior comparisons to python until Julia has mainstream popularity. That’s rubbish. Python is much less expressive.

lenticular 8y ago

Python does have excellent libraries and it fits many people's mental model of programming, but not mine. I still use it often. However, for a dynamic language, it is simply not very expressive. It has no multi-line lambdas, OO syntax that I find a bit awkward, and some other limitations. These can be seen as advantages, since they enforce the "there's only one way to do it" philosophy, but that doesn't work for me.

dman 8y ago

Wish advocates of all new languages stuck with this principle.

lenticular 8y ago
I wasn't being disrespectful of Python. We are allowed to criticize languages. The fact is, by any reasonable measure, Julia is more expressive than Python, which was all I stated. This is an advantage of Julia. Both languages have advantages and disadvantages, and comparing them honestly is necessary for people to make a good choice when selecting a language for a project. C is less expressive than Python or Julia, but no one would say C is a bad language based on that. And no C programmer would disagree with that statement. It's not about putting any language or community down. By your argument, it sounds like we cannot talk about any advantages a new language may have over existing ones. If we stuck to that, how could we possibly make any argument over why one may want to select a newer language?
- xiaodai 8y ago
  Can you give concrete examples of where Julia is more expressive than Python? I can think of defining custom units https://medium.com/@Jernfrost/defining-custom-units-in-julia-and-python-513c34a4c971 https://medium.com/@Jernfrost/defining-custom-units-in-julia...
  - lenticular 8y ago
    I give examples of expressivity in my comment above. The multiple dispatch is completely ubiquitous in Julia, being the default. This allows for the definition of flexible and extensible interfaces similar to Haskell's typeclasses. Macros are used to make things like PyCall or generate fast and flexible CUDA code. This is not easily possible in Python, especially not with high performance.

eigenspace 8y ago

Criticisms of languages should not be taken as criticisms of their creators or users. I don't see anything wrong with saying "Language X does Y better than language Z in my use cases." Languages are toolsets and programmers are always looking for appropriate tools for a given task. It seems crazy to demand that people not be able to talk honestly about their experiences using a given tool. Python doesn't have feelings, it won't be sad if you don't like it.

xiaodai 8y ago
Even if it does, what's wrong with stating an opinion? Why does an honest opinion have to be branded "smear"?

hpcjoe 8y ago

Hmm ... I remember when Perl was king and Python was the shiny new thing. I watched Python supporters belittle Perl as "line noise" and other quite silly descriptions. They were all proud of "there is only one way do to it" versus the linguistic Perl way of "there is more than one way to do it." I am experiencing something of a sense of schadenfreude over defense of Python against a newcomer. 20 years on, Perl is still in widespread use, still unbeatable for its growing use cases. I don't wish to speculate where Python will be 20 years from now. I do know that Fortran will still be around. That's about the only sure thing.