4 ms·

n=1 but I am a Rubyist migrating to Julia, FWIW.

by robbseaton 7y ago

lasagnaphil 7y ago
I'm curious what makes you want to move to Julia, because it seems that the overall philosophy of the two languages are quite far from each other. Would you mind if you share?
- socialdemocrat 7y ago
  robbseaton probably has other reasons but I was a huge Ruby fan years ago and have been using Julia for many years now. For me both languages have similar types of appeal. Ruby is quick to pick up, allows you to write expressive code and is built on the idea of everything being an object. So Ruby is both clean, easy and expressive. Julia is EXACTLY the same, but for the modern age. It is easy to learn and expressive. Like Ruby the type system is consistent all over. It is not like Java which has primitive types and objects. Numbers in both Julia and Ruby are treated like any other type. The primary difference is that Ruby came of age in the most object-oriented hyped period of programming language development and that reflects its heavy OOP design. Julia came around when OOP was no longer considered the silver bullet. So why Julia has elaborate type hierarchies, it is probably closer to a functional language than an object-oriented one. When Ruby came out it was a language that appealed to programming language geeks like me. It had a bunch of really powerful features we where not used to. Julia is kind of the same. Multiple-dispatch and Julia macros is something that appeals to all geeks. I actually never switched to Julia for performance reasons, but because I loved the language.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    > Julia came around when OOP was no longer considered the silver bullet. Julia has multimethods dispatch. One of the most famous writings about them is called "The Art of MetaObject Protocol". A book to be read by everyone that thinks OOP is just the Java way. While at it, reading about BETA and Self would also be illuminating.

4 ms·

n=1 but I am a Rubyist migrating to Julia, FWIW.

by robbseaton 7y ago

n=1 but I am a Rubyist migrating to Julia, FWIW.

lasagnaphil 7y ago
I'm curious what makes you want to move to Julia, because it seems that the overall philosophy of the two languages are quite far from each other. Would you mind if you share?
- socialdemocrat 7y ago
  robbseaton probably has other reasons but I was a huge Ruby fan years ago and have been using Julia for many years now. For me both languages have similar types of appeal. Ruby is quick to pick up, allows you to write expressive code and is built on the idea of everything being an object. So Ruby is both clean, easy and expressive. Julia is EXACTLY the same, but for the modern age. It is easy to learn and expressive. Like Ruby the type system is consistent all over. It is not like Java which has primitive types and objects. Numbers in both Julia and Ruby are treated like any other type. The primary difference is that Ruby came of age in the most object-oriented hyped period of programming language development and that reflects its heavy OOP design. Julia came around when OOP was no longer considered the silver bullet. So why Julia has elaborate type hierarchies, it is probably closer to a functional language than an object-oriented one. When Ruby came out it was a language that appealed to programming language geeks like me. It had a bunch of really powerful features we where not used to. Julia is kind of the same. Multiple-dispatch and Julia macros is something that appeals to all geeks. I actually never switched to Julia for performance reasons, but because I loved the language.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    > Julia came around when OOP was no longer considered the silver bullet. Julia has multimethods dispatch. One of the most famous writings about them is called "The Art of MetaObject Protocol". A book to be read by everyone that thinks OOP is just the Java way. While at it, reading about BETA and Self would also be illuminating.