4 ms·

It's a better time to first plot than matlab, which is one of the other major contenders. On my computer it is about 3 seconds, which is noticable, but far from

It's a better time to first plot than matlab, which is one of the other major contenders. On my computer it is about 3 seconds, which is noticable, but far from disqualifing.

systemvoltage 6y ago
Julia oversells itself as a general purpose language which I find absolutely out of line. Their marketing needs to be a lot more humble until they figure out the kinks. Also, my guess would be Python and not Matlab as it’s main competitors.
- eigenspace 6y ago
  In what way is marketing julia as a general purpose programming language 'way out of line'? People use julia to make webservers, write programming languages, create plotting libraries, do scientific analysis, do compiler research, make video games, do HPC, etc. Julia has a design that's indeed strongly informed by scientific computing, but in order to actually meet the needs of the various people using it for scientific and technical purposes, it ended up needing to become a flexible enough language to be useful for anything.
  - systemvoltage 6y ago
    Do you think R or Matlab is a general purpopse language? Sure you could do all these things but should you? Julia is clearly positioned as a scientific computing language. Let's be clear.
    - eigenspace 6y ago
      Doing these things in julia is very different from doing these things in R or Matlab. The tooling and ecosystem for non-scientific applications in Julia is growing rapidly and is quite competent. Julia is absolutely a general purpose language. It’s user base skews heavily towards scientific computing, but the demographics and ecosystem are broadening daily.
      - systemvoltage 6y ago
        Having used Julia for 2+ years, I couldn't disagree more. Productionizing Julia code has been a total nightmare. The community library support has been growing but hasn't gone through the wringer. Just because things are improving doesn't provide a meaningful understanding against its competitors. I don't see any reason to use Julia over Go for backend webservers. Rust or C++ for systems programming. And frankly, I prefer Python for scientific computing. Julia also has a tiny standard library and lots of flaky external libs which make productionization of code a risky adventure which I have personally been bitten by. Most people are allured by Julia's overhyped marketing which is a shame because the original paper by Stefan is pretty impressive. We're seeing some criticisms of Julia in this thread, rightfully so. My advise to people who are subscribed to Julia's marketing is to listen to people that are complaining. No one wants to just complain, they're saying that because of many reasons. Be humble and try to listen, accept Julia's many shortcomings (error messages and stack traces, library support, startup time, IDE, debugging, etc.). Julia has many shortcomings that are only apparently after using it outside of the Jupyter Notebooks. Not accepting those makes you an annoying fanboy.
        eigenspace 6y ago
        > I don't see any reason to use Julia over Go for backend webservers. Rust or C++ for systems programming. And frankly, I prefer Python for scientific computing. Sure, I would never claim Julia is being the best language for webservers or systems programming. If someone came to me saying they wanted to do this in Julia, I'd probably tell them "if this is important, I'd probably look at a more established language for this purpose unless you have a good reason to want to use julia for this" That doesn't make julia not a general purpose programming language. It just means it's not the best language for every imaginable purpose (no language is). I personally prefer Julia very strongly for scientific computing to it's competitors, and because of the amount of time I've invested in it for that, I also do many other things in it and I find it quite nice for this. It's totally fair that you prefer Python for scientific computing. Python has a great ecosystem and huge community with tonnes of investment! It's an incredibly stiff competitor. I prefer Julia, and think I have strong reasons to do so, but everyone's needs and desires and different. > No one wants to just complain This is an empirical claim about human psychology and it's false. But regardless, yes there are a lot of totally valid criticisms of julia in this thread! Just because these criticisms exist and some of them have good points doesn't make julia a bad language though. Please consider the fact that not everybody has the same needs, desires and temperament as you. Every language has major probelms with it, but different people feel these problems differently. For many people (for example, me), Julia is a gigantic breath of fresh air! For others, it's painful and clunky. I think there's a lot of good here that people should see and check out and think about, even if they decide it's not for them. Especially because these things improve every day. ___________________________________________________ Just a disclaimer in case anyone is suspicious about my affiliations: I have absolutely zero financial stake in Julia's success. I am not employed by anyone who would benefit from more people switching to julia. I'm a physics PhD student. I simply find julia very useful and pleasant to use and want to share that with others.
    - FridgeSeal 6y ago
      Julia is a general-purpose language, with language and implementation features conducive to scientific computing.
  - ku-man 6y ago
    Video games in Julia?, come on. No one is going to make a video game in Julia (unless you consider the hang-man or sudoku a video game). Julia is already being oversold as a scientific programming language, so absurd claims that Julia can be used to develop video games are just going to damage even more its credibility.
- adgjlsfhk1 6y ago
  Julia has a lot of main competitors. I would consider Julia a competitor to Fortran, C, Matlab, R, and python. If you look at DifferentialEquations.jl or the clima.jl package, these are packages that are competing with low level libraries that would traditionally be written in C or Fortran. It competes with these by offering comparable performance, while having much better quality of life features (like automatic PGO, a package system, metaprogramming, and not having to deal with make files). It competes with matlab by having an incredibly rich linear algebra library, while being free and not making you do dumb stuff like 1 function per file.

It's a better time to first plot than matlab, which is one of the other major contenders. On my computer it is about 3 seconds, which is noticable, but far from disqualifing.

systemvoltage 6y ago

Julia oversells itself as a general purpose language which I find absolutely out of line. Their marketing needs to be a lot more humble until they figure out the kinks. Also, my guess would be Python and not Matlab as it’s main competitors.

eigenspace 6y ago
In what way is marketing julia as a general purpose programming language 'way out of line'? People use julia to make webservers, write programming languages, create plotting libraries, do scientific analysis, do compiler research, make video games, do HPC, etc. Julia has a design that's indeed strongly informed by scientific computing, but in order to actually meet the needs of the various people using it for scientific and technical purposes, it ended up needing to become a flexible enough language to be useful for anything.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  Do you think R or Matlab is a general purpopse language? Sure you could do all these things but should you? Julia is clearly positioned as a scientific computing language. Let's be clear.
  - eigenspace 6y ago
    Doing these things in julia is very different from doing these things in R or Matlab. The tooling and ecosystem for non-scientific applications in Julia is growing rapidly and is quite competent. Julia is absolutely a general purpose language. It’s user base skews heavily towards scientific computing, but the demographics and ecosystem are broadening daily.
    - systemvoltage 6y ago
      Having used Julia for 2+ years, I couldn't disagree more. Productionizing Julia code has been a total nightmare. The community library support has been growing but hasn't gone through the wringer. Just because things are improving doesn't provide a meaningful understanding against its competitors. I don't see any reason to use Julia over Go for backend webservers. Rust or C++ for systems programming. And frankly, I prefer Python for scientific computing. Julia also has a tiny standard library and lots of flaky external libs which make productionization of code a risky adventure which I have personally been bitten by. Most people are allured by Julia's overhyped marketing which is a shame because the original paper by Stefan is pretty impressive. We're seeing some criticisms of Julia in this thread, rightfully so. My advise to people who are subscribed to Julia's marketing is to listen to people that are complaining. No one wants to just complain, they're saying that because of many reasons. Be humble and try to listen, accept Julia's many shortcomings (error messages and stack traces, library support, startup time, IDE, debugging, etc.). Julia has many shortcomings that are only apparently after using it outside of the Jupyter Notebooks. Not accepting those makes you an annoying fanboy.
      - eigenspace 6y ago
        > I don't see any reason to use Julia over Go for backend webservers. Rust or C++ for systems programming. And frankly, I prefer Python for scientific computing. Sure, I would never claim Julia is being the best language for webservers or systems programming. If someone came to me saying they wanted to do this in Julia, I'd probably tell them "if this is important, I'd probably look at a more established language for this purpose unless you have a good reason to want to use julia for this" That doesn't make julia not a general purpose programming language. It just means it's not the best language for every imaginable purpose (no language is). I personally prefer Julia very strongly for scientific computing to it's competitors, and because of the amount of time I've invested in it for that, I also do many other things in it and I find it quite nice for this. It's totally fair that you prefer Python for scientific computing. Python has a great ecosystem and huge community with tonnes of investment! It's an incredibly stiff competitor. I prefer Julia, and think I have strong reasons to do so, but everyone's needs and desires and different. > No one wants to just complain This is an empirical claim about human psychology and it's false. But regardless, yes there are a lot of totally valid criticisms of julia in this thread! Just because these criticisms exist and some of them have good points doesn't make julia a bad language though. Please consider the fact that not everybody has the same needs, desires and temperament as you. Every language has major probelms with it, but different people feel these problems differently. For many people (for example, me), Julia is a gigantic breath of fresh air! For others, it's painful and clunky. I think there's a lot of good here that people should see and check out and think about, even if they decide it's not for them. Especially because these things improve every day. ___________________________________________________ Just a disclaimer in case anyone is suspicious about my affiliations: I have absolutely zero financial stake in Julia's success. I am not employed by anyone who would benefit from more people switching to julia. I'm a physics PhD student. I simply find julia very useful and pleasant to use and want to share that with others.
  - FridgeSeal 6y ago
    Julia is a general-purpose language, with language and implementation features conducive to scientific computing.
- ku-man 6y ago
  Video games in Julia?, come on. No one is going to make a video game in Julia (unless you consider the hang-man or sudoku a video game). Julia is already being oversold as a scientific programming language, so absurd claims that Julia can be used to develop video games are just going to damage even more its credibility.
adgjlsfhk1 6y ago
Julia has a lot of main competitors. I would consider Julia a competitor to Fortran, C, Matlab, R, and python. If you look at DifferentialEquations.jl or the clima.jl package, these are packages that are competing with low level libraries that would traditionally be written in C or Fortran. It competes with these by offering comparable performance, while having much better quality of life features (like automatic PGO, a package system, metaprogramming, and not having to deal with make files). It competes with matlab by having an incredibly rich linear algebra library, while being free and not making you do dumb stuff like 1 function per file.