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I actually have very similar experiences. I want to like Julia and I look at it from time to time. The hype is always that it allows one to write C-speed code w

I actually have very similar experiences. I want to like Julia and I look at it from time to time. The hype is always that it allows one to write C-speed code with the simplicity of python, without the idiosyncrasies of numpy. But every time I look I find just as many little things to look out for if one cares about performance, don't use abstract types is another one. I understand why this is the case and I don't have an issue generally with it, but considering that I know Python well, and know how to speed up Python using numba, pythran or cython, I don't see what I would gain by investing in Julia. Instead I've now decided to learn Rust, as it fills a different niche and I can use it for writing python modules for some of my bottleneck code.

physicsguy 6y ago
This chimes so much with me. I started coding in ~2011. I know how to use Cython, Numba, etc. and the options for accelerating Python are getting better all the time. I'm a confident C/C++/Fortran programmer by virtue of having worked in those languages for HPC codes anyway. Whenever I've tried to use Julia for things, it just feels like an awkward hybrid of Python and C++. Plus, I think people forget that Python now works pretty well on Windows, and I don't think the same can be necessarily said for Julia. In my University, we support a lot of people on Windows with Python packages - particularly outside of traditonally HPC type areas. As a final thing - on one occasion last year, I tried to integrate a Julia interpreter into an application - something Python does really well on all platforms. I found that copying the code from the website example verbatim did not work on Windows, didn't appear to have done for the best part of a year, and wasn't in the testing framework. I've just checked and it's still not resolved.
- cbkeller 6y ago
  Examples being out of date is definitely an issue since a lot of things are still changing quickly in the ecosystem as a whole. I think it’s getting better as more packages go 1.0 and internals stabilize a bit, but nonetheless. As far as your comment about “awkwardness”, the key point for me was when I actually started to understand/embrace multiple dispatch as a programming paradigm. If you try to write Julia like in a an imperative or oo or etc. style, it may work, but will be clunky and quite possibly full of type instabilities. But if you write Julia in a “dispatch-oriented” paradigm then it really is just as performant and elegant as advertised, IMO.

physicsguy 6y ago

This chimes so much with me. I started coding in ~2011. I know how to use Cython, Numba, etc. and the options for accelerating Python are getting better all the time. I'm a confident C/C++/Fortran programmer by virtue of having worked in those languages for HPC codes anyway. Whenever I've tried to use Julia for things, it just feels like an awkward hybrid of Python and C++. Plus, I think people forget that Python now works pretty well on Windows, and I don't think the same can be necessarily said for Julia. In my University, we support a lot of people on Windows with Python packages - particularly outside of traditonally HPC type areas. As a final thing - on one occasion last year, I tried to integrate a Julia interpreter into an application - something Python does really well on all platforms. I found that copying the code from the website example verbatim did not work on Windows, didn't appear to have done for the best part of a year, and wasn't in the testing framework. I've just checked and it's still not resolved.

cbkeller 6y ago
Examples being out of date is definitely an issue since a lot of things are still changing quickly in the ecosystem as a whole. I think it’s getting better as more packages go 1.0 and internals stabilize a bit, but nonetheless. As far as your comment about “awkwardness”, the key point for me was when I actually started to understand/embrace multiple dispatch as a programming paradigm. If you try to write Julia like in a an imperative or oo or etc. style, it may work, but will be clunky and quite possibly full of type instabilities. But if you write Julia in a “dispatch-oriented” paradigm then it really is just as performant and elegant as advertised, IMO.