3 ms·

Not only for technical computing: changing the narrative around Julia

50 points by byt143 8y ago

choeger 8y ago
But it has no (sound, complete) static typing! Tbh, u think we kind of see a new generation here: * Rust improved over C++ and C * Julia improved over python But if you take a closer look you see that neither actually approach the radical completeness of their actual competitors: * Julia does not fully embrace its lisp heritage (I was told the developers where old lispers) * Rust does not fully embrace Haskell's type discipline So what do you think, is there enough room between rust and Haskell and Julia and lisp for yet another iteration?
- jjnoakes 8y ago
  For the uneducated among us who are considering learning Julia (and who have decent type system knowledge), where does Julia fall short for static type enthusiasts?
  - ninjaaron 8y ago
    You don't have to declare types, but they are enforced when you do declare them. I'm not exactly how this is bad. Anyway, you can get into a scenario like you do with Python where type errors occur at runtime if you're not using a typed function. I'm fine with it, as you might expect from the fact that I'm the author of the linked post.
  - choeger 8y ago
    Julia checks types dynamically. It's type system depends on the evaluation first. So any errors are catched eventually, but not on your desk.
    - ninjaaron 8y ago
      This is only partially true. Almost all types are known at compile time because Julia was designed with static evaluation in mind. Many type errors are caught at compile time.
- ninjaaron 8y ago
  There are four guys credited as the creators of Julia, but the guy who sort of had the initial idea, Jeff Bezanson, is definitely a lisp enthusiast. He created his own dialect of scheme (like every lisp enthusiast), femtolisp https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp This lisp is still used as part of the Julia parser. Julia isn't really a lisp and it isn't trying to be, though it does have some things in common: * AST macros * everything is an expression and has a value * while infix notation is supported for operators, they are just normal functions. Still, the language is very much array-oriented and, as far as I know, there isn't even a linked list implementation in the standard library. It's a side-effect of trying to be fast. (pun strongly intended.)

50 points by byt143 8y ago

But it has no (sound, complete) static typing! Tbh, u think we kind of see a new generation here: * Rust improved over C++ and C * Julia improved over python But if you take a closer look you see that neither actually approach the radical completeness of their actual competitors: * Julia does not fully embrace its lisp heritage (I was told the developers where old lispers) * Rust does not fully embrace Haskell's type discipline So what do you think, is there enough room between rust and Haskell and Julia and lisp for yet another iteration?

jjnoakes 8y ago
For the uneducated among us who are considering learning Julia (and who have decent type system knowledge), where does Julia fall short for static type enthusiasts?
- ninjaaron 8y ago
  You don't have to declare types, but they are enforced when you do declare them. I'm not exactly how this is bad. Anyway, you can get into a scenario like you do with Python where type errors occur at runtime if you're not using a typed function. I'm fine with it, as you might expect from the fact that I'm the author of the linked post.
- choeger 8y ago
  Julia checks types dynamically. It's type system depends on the evaluation first. So any errors are catched eventually, but not on your desk.
  - ninjaaron 8y ago
    This is only partially true. Almost all types are known at compile time because Julia was designed with static evaluation in mind. Many type errors are caught at compile time.
ninjaaron 8y ago
There are four guys credited as the creators of Julia, but the guy who sort of had the initial idea, Jeff Bezanson, is definitely a lisp enthusiast. He created his own dialect of scheme (like every lisp enthusiast), femtolisp https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp This lisp is still used as part of the Julia parser. Julia isn't really a lisp and it isn't trying to be, though it does have some things in common: * AST macros * everything is an expression and has a value * while infix notation is supported for operators, they are just normal functions. Still, the language is very much array-oriented and, as far as I know, there isn't even a linked list implementation in the standard library. It's a side-effect of trying to be fast. (pun strongly intended.)