5 ms·

At the time they were “picking” candidates for the Tensorflow rewrite, Julia already had Flux with an early version of Zygote and was doing auto differentiation

At the time they were “picking” candidates for the Tensorflow rewrite, Julia already had Flux with an early version of Zygote and was doing auto differentiation at the language level. This was literally the killer feature they wanted, and were prepared to re-wore how significant portions of the swift language and compiler functioned to get it. Had they chosen the language based on actual suitability and not because one of them was Chris Lattners pet-project, they could have automatically been significantly further ahead in far less time and energy.

yahyaheee 6y ago
Yeah Google really messed this up, they had a golden opportunity and they went the wrong direction. Julia would have been better but IMO they should have just created a new language from scratch
- fishmaster 6y ago
  > they should have just created a new language from scratch God, please not another one with new tools, new libraries, etc.
  - yahyaheee 6y ago
    Right because there are so many great existing options for ML
    - fishmaster 6y ago
      ... yes?
      - yahyaheee 6y ago
        Python — no threads, or built in types Julia — odd language R — not a general purpose programming language Most of the data scientist and ml engineers I work with want a new language. So yeah it’s not a bad idea
        fishmaster 6y ago
        > Julia — odd language What a profound criticism. If data scientists can't use Julia then they're not great data scientists - you have RCall and PyCall, Flux, Knet, MLJ, plotting libraries, etc. It has built-in and user-defined types, threads, multiple dispatch, ... "Please don't think that Julia is only useful for 1. custom units 2. custom GPU kernels 3. Custom array types 4. custom bayesian priors. 5. AD through custom types 6. Task based parallelism 7. symbolic gradients with modeling toolkit 8. Agent based modeling 9. physics informed neural networks 10. abstract tables types ..."
        yahyaheee 6y ago
        What a great statement, its not that they can't its that they don't want to use it. I really tried to like Julia, wrote it for months, but it misses the mark. I've been working in analytics for 10 years and of everyone I know who's tried it I only know a couple people who like Julia. Thats a problem, and you can see it in the adoption numbers. The Julia community keeps wanting to bury their head in the sand and pretend its not which is fun.

yahyaheee 6y ago

Yeah Google really messed this up, they had a golden opportunity and they went the wrong direction. Julia would have been better but IMO they should have just created a new language from scratch

fishmaster 6y ago
> they should have just created a new language from scratch God, please not another one with new tools, new libraries, etc.
- yahyaheee 6y ago
  Right because there are so many great existing options for ML
  - fishmaster 6y ago
    ... yes?
    - yahyaheee 6y ago
      Python — no threads, or built in types Julia — odd language R — not a general purpose programming language Most of the data scientist and ml engineers I work with want a new language. So yeah it’s not a bad idea
      - fishmaster 6y ago
        > Julia — odd language What a profound criticism. If data scientists can't use Julia then they're not great data scientists - you have RCall and PyCall, Flux, Knet, MLJ, plotting libraries, etc. It has built-in and user-defined types, threads, multiple dispatch, ... "Please don't think that Julia is only useful for 1. custom units 2. custom GPU kernels 3. Custom array types 4. custom bayesian priors. 5. AD through custom types 6. Task based parallelism 7. symbolic gradients with modeling toolkit 8. Agent based modeling 9. physics informed neural networks 10. abstract tables types ..."
        yahyaheee 6y ago
        What a great statement, its not that they can't its that they don't want to use it. I really tried to like Julia, wrote it for months, but it misses the mark. I've been working in analytics for 10 years and of everyone I know who's tried it I only know a couple people who like Julia. Thats a problem, and you can see it in the adoption numbers. The Julia community keeps wanting to bury their head in the sand and pretend its not which is fun.