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Julia is an interesting language. I see that there's a lot of excitement for it, but most excitement seems to come from data scientists who are heavier on the e

Julia is an interesting language. I see that there's a lot of excitement for it, but most excitement seems to come from data scientists who are heavier on the engineer side. For almost all of the rest of the data scientists I know, Python seems "more than good enough". Also to note, Julia has seen a rise over the last few years, but so has Python, its primary competitor in the data science field.

qaq 6y ago
I am pretty excited about Julia potential for web apps
- dnautics 6y ago
  I wouldn't be. I love julia, but it doesn't have a spectacular error-handling story. So if you have to start running a web server, and also have to worry about people issuing a DDOS or finding sneaky ways to cause your system to consume a ton of resources on a handful of threads, and lower availability, it's not going to get pretty. Unless you mean compling julia or something like it to WASM and running it in the browser. That could get interesting, but julia is still "a bit too chonky" for that.
  - ddragon 6y ago
    To be fair you wouldn't just expose your server directly nowadays, you'd have them in a container orchestrator like k8s that would have a liveness probe (and container usage tracking) that would appropriately scale/restart pods as to not have the system going down, together with load balancers and DDoS protection systems like AWS Shield to detect such attempts. And of course, you can also use a more low latency high availability oriented language handling the frontend (like Elixir, which will have trouble doing the heavy data oriented stuff Julia can), with Julia as a microservice to handle the actual backend logic and analytics, which is probably the setup I'd go for (using 2 high level lispy-languages with very different qualities, each doing what it does best).
    - dnautics 6y ago
      > And of course, you can also use a more low latency high availability oriented language handling the frontend (like Elixir, which will have trouble doing the heavy data oriented stuff Julia can), with Julia as a microservice to handle the actual backend logic and analytics, which is probably the setup I'd go for (using 2 high level lispy-languages with very different qualities, each doing what it does best). I would do this exactly too, if I had to do number crunching.
  - qaq 6y ago
    this is a problem with pretty much every lang used for web dev. Most web apps are behind Nginx or some API proxy etc. to mitigate.
ku-man 6y ago
Nim is a great general-purpose language I have been using lately for my numeric and data heavy processing needs. Julia's overenthusiastic posts here in HN make me wary of the language instead of curious.
- MrMan 6y ago
  Yes I like nim more than Julia but Julia has this big push behind it. If you put the same resources into nim it would be a more usable (not saying better) language.
smabie 6y ago
It's only good enough for data scientists because they don't know any better. For existing projects, fine, stick with Python. But Julia is strictly superior to Python in everyway, there is nothing that Python is better at than Julia. This is partially because Julia can call any Python library, but mostly because it's actually designed for data science and scientific computing.
- bobajeff 6y ago
  >But Julia is strictly superior to Python in everyway That is until you use the debugger.
  - FridgeSeal 6y ago
    The debugger has had a huge amount of work done on it recently. Anyway, half the data-scientists I know don't use the debugger, they're solidly in the print-to-debug camp, or they're using notebooks and going step-by-step.
    - smabie 6y ago
      Hell half the programmers I know don't ever use a debugger. I usually prefer to just think about my code and add some print statements, but occasionally I get super frustrated and throw up my hands. Feels like a personal failing on my part though.
  - siproprio 6y ago
    >>But Julia is strictly superior to Python in everyway >That is until you use the debugger. Or stumble into the first example in JuliaPlots, which doesn't work.
    - smabie 6y ago
      What example are you referring to?
    - dunefox 6y ago

qaq 6y ago

I am pretty excited about Julia potential for web apps

dnautics 6y ago
I wouldn't be. I love julia, but it doesn't have a spectacular error-handling story. So if you have to start running a web server, and also have to worry about people issuing a DDOS or finding sneaky ways to cause your system to consume a ton of resources on a handful of threads, and lower availability, it's not going to get pretty. Unless you mean compling julia or something like it to WASM and running it in the browser. That could get interesting, but julia is still "a bit too chonky" for that.
- ddragon 6y ago
  To be fair you wouldn't just expose your server directly nowadays, you'd have them in a container orchestrator like k8s that would have a liveness probe (and container usage tracking) that would appropriately scale/restart pods as to not have the system going down, together with load balancers and DDoS protection systems like AWS Shield to detect such attempts. And of course, you can also use a more low latency high availability oriented language handling the frontend (like Elixir, which will have trouble doing the heavy data oriented stuff Julia can), with Julia as a microservice to handle the actual backend logic and analytics, which is probably the setup I'd go for (using 2 high level lispy-languages with very different qualities, each doing what it does best).
  - dnautics 6y ago
    > And of course, you can also use a more low latency high availability oriented language handling the frontend (like Elixir, which will have trouble doing the heavy data oriented stuff Julia can), with Julia as a microservice to handle the actual backend logic and analytics, which is probably the setup I'd go for (using 2 high level lispy-languages with very different qualities, each doing what it does best). I would do this exactly too, if I had to do number crunching.
- qaq 6y ago
  this is a problem with pretty much every lang used for web dev. Most web apps are behind Nginx or some API proxy etc. to mitigate.

ku-man 6y ago

Nim is a great general-purpose language I have been using lately for my numeric and data heavy processing needs. Julia's overenthusiastic posts here in HN make me wary of the language instead of curious.

MrMan 6y ago
Yes I like nim more than Julia but Julia has this big push behind it. If you put the same resources into nim it would be a more usable (not saying better) language.

smabie 6y ago

It's only good enough for data scientists because they don't know any better. For existing projects, fine, stick with Python. But Julia is strictly superior to Python in everyway, there is nothing that Python is better at than Julia. This is partially because Julia can call any Python library, but mostly because it's actually designed for data science and scientific computing.

bobajeff 6y ago
>But Julia is strictly superior to Python in everyway That is until you use the debugger.
- FridgeSeal 6y ago
  The debugger has had a huge amount of work done on it recently. Anyway, half the data-scientists I know don't use the debugger, they're solidly in the print-to-debug camp, or they're using notebooks and going step-by-step.
  - smabie 6y ago
    Hell half the programmers I know don't ever use a debugger. I usually prefer to just think about my code and add some print statements, but occasionally I get super frustrated and throw up my hands. Feels like a personal failing on my part though.
- siproprio 6y ago
  >>But Julia is strictly superior to Python in everyway >That is until you use the debugger. Or stumble into the first example in JuliaPlots, which doesn't work.
  - smabie 6y ago
    What example are you referring to?
  - dunefox 6y ago