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I mean, you're totally free to blaze your own development workflow trail. Even better if you can help in the ongoing clearing and paving of the less-used trails

I mean, you're totally free to blaze your own development workflow trail. Even better if you can help in the ongoing clearing and paving of the less-used trails. But when someone complains that a less-used trail is rocky, it's gonna be hard for everyone on the golden brick road to avoid suggesting taking their route... especially if it's leading to the same destination. And yes, that destination does include production.

jampekka 5y ago
Yes you are, but then you have to wait a minute or so after any single change to any file if you do a script workflow. If you do a Revise workflow you end up doing mostly the same because it just breaks all the time and you have to reload the session. Or you can use some bizarre hack like DaemonMode.jl that also just breaks all the time. Julia is hard to debug as is (and this is fully acceptable to me due to the architecture) and these hacks on hacks make it just impossible. Julia suffers from the same "fancy calculator" approach than e.g. R and Matlab, and like those, they refuse to take note of the decades of experience in software development that this just leads to a total mess if you have anything more complicated than a one-off analysis. It's like insisting on editing files with ed because that's how it's always been done.
- mbauman 5y ago
  And this is precisely why this dynamic exists — because there are workflows with far less friction than what you've experienced. I and others successfully use them every day for things far more complicated than one-off analyses. I think your view of Julia as a "fancy calculator" may be part and parcel to the difficulty. I do use it as a fancy calculator, but I also use local packages all the time — and that's where you'll find the best success in both tooling and code structure for sustainable (and modern) development. We need to do a better job of helping folks more effectively develop and work with Julia before it becomes frustrating.
  - jampekka 5y ago
    Friction in general, or friction specific to Julia? My view is that Julia (and R and Matlab etc) ecosystem's view is a "fancy calculator". It's hard to integrate to anything else, it almost actively tries to make e.g. unix-type workflow difficult (not much CLI, everything done in REPL, e.g. package management). Not as bad as e.g. R where its almost impossible to just run a file of code instead of doing a "workflow session". Perhaps there is some disconnect in how different parties of the discussion see the whole thing. For me this sounds a lot like "you're holding it wrong". What background are you coming from and what languages/programming environments you are familiar with? I get the impression that you don't have much general purpose programming background and somehow tend to assume that people are using "wrong workflows" due to being just stupid or something. But this is how it comes off to me, I think you mean something else, but I don't know what that is. My approach is: I want files with code and I want to run some of those with some kind of entry point. And preferably organize it to files or something like that. This is the usual setup for general purpose programming languages. In general purpose programming you rarely tend to stick solely to one language, any larger project is usually a mishmash of different stuff, e.g. glue code in python, tight loops in C, maybe some bash thrown around to do some more trivial chores. This is the overall structure of practically all general purpose programming languages. This requires interfacing with these languages (often done in bash or something in unixy systems at least) and tools that work regardless of language (e.g. version control, grepping, Make etc). Julia (and R and Matlab etc) just plain refuse to even consider this as a valid approach. If you mention it somewhere, you tend to get some bizarre instant putdowns that provide no real rationale, i.e. "you're just holding it wrong". In programming I tend to think the whole computer and its OS and so on as the programming tool. My impression is that for Julia folks Julia is something totally separate from anything else in the computer. But I don't understand why. Is it that its felt that changing syntax on the fly is too cognitively demanding or something? This is something that one gets used to very fast. And also tends to ease the IMHO weird hung-ups on syntax. In fact, I think Julia has made some (IMHO misguided) syntactic decisions because they just want to do something differently from Python just for the sake of being different. I find this totally senseless. Us CLI folks are not even asking for much. Just a way to call a program with arguments and so that you don't have to do compile identical code every time you do something. That's it. Is that unreasonable? It wouldn't take anything away from people using REPLs and Notebooks. We don't want to change the language, the language is fine and that's why we'd like to use it but just cant because these paper cuts! I've expanded on my rationale for my workflow and how Julia makes it really difficult e.g. here, where I admittedly started with too strong wordings out of frustration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26134970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26134970

jampekka 5y ago

Yes you are, but then you have to wait a minute or so after any single change to any file if you do a script workflow. If you do a Revise workflow you end up doing mostly the same because it just breaks all the time and you have to reload the session. Or you can use some bizarre hack like DaemonMode.jl that also just breaks all the time. Julia is hard to debug as is (and this is fully acceptable to me due to the architecture) and these hacks on hacks make it just impossible. Julia suffers from the same "fancy calculator" approach than e.g. R and Matlab, and like those, they refuse to take note of the decades of experience in software development that this just leads to a total mess if you have anything more complicated than a one-off analysis. It's like insisting on editing files with ed because that's how it's always been done.

mbauman 5y ago
And this is precisely why this dynamic exists — because there are workflows with far less friction than what you've experienced. I and others successfully use them every day for things far more complicated than one-off analyses. I think your view of Julia as a "fancy calculator" may be part and parcel to the difficulty. I do use it as a fancy calculator, but I also use local packages all the time — and that's where you'll find the best success in both tooling and code structure for sustainable (and modern) development. We need to do a better job of helping folks more effectively develop and work with Julia before it becomes frustrating.
- jampekka 5y ago
  Friction in general, or friction specific to Julia? My view is that Julia (and R and Matlab etc) ecosystem's view is a "fancy calculator". It's hard to integrate to anything else, it almost actively tries to make e.g. unix-type workflow difficult (not much CLI, everything done in REPL, e.g. package management). Not as bad as e.g. R where its almost impossible to just run a file of code instead of doing a "workflow session". Perhaps there is some disconnect in how different parties of the discussion see the whole thing. For me this sounds a lot like "you're holding it wrong". What background are you coming from and what languages/programming environments you are familiar with? I get the impression that you don't have much general purpose programming background and somehow tend to assume that people are using "wrong workflows" due to being just stupid or something. But this is how it comes off to me, I think you mean something else, but I don't know what that is. My approach is: I want files with code and I want to run some of those with some kind of entry point. And preferably organize it to files or something like that. This is the usual setup for general purpose programming languages. In general purpose programming you rarely tend to stick solely to one language, any larger project is usually a mishmash of different stuff, e.g. glue code in python, tight loops in C, maybe some bash thrown around to do some more trivial chores. This is the overall structure of practically all general purpose programming languages. This requires interfacing with these languages (often done in bash or something in unixy systems at least) and tools that work regardless of language (e.g. version control, grepping, Make etc). Julia (and R and Matlab etc) just plain refuse to even consider this as a valid approach. If you mention it somewhere, you tend to get some bizarre instant putdowns that provide no real rationale, i.e. "you're just holding it wrong". In programming I tend to think the whole computer and its OS and so on as the programming tool. My impression is that for Julia folks Julia is something totally separate from anything else in the computer. But I don't understand why. Is it that its felt that changing syntax on the fly is too cognitively demanding or something? This is something that one gets used to very fast. And also tends to ease the IMHO weird hung-ups on syntax. In fact, I think Julia has made some (IMHO misguided) syntactic decisions because they just want to do something differently from Python just for the sake of being different. I find this totally senseless. Us CLI folks are not even asking for much. Just a way to call a program with arguments and so that you don't have to do compile identical code every time you do something. That's it. Is that unreasonable? It wouldn't take anything away from people using REPLs and Notebooks. We don't want to change the language, the language is fine and that's why we'd like to use it but just cant because these paper cuts! I've expanded on my rationale for my workflow and how Julia makes it really difficult e.g. here, where I admittedly started with too strong wordings out of frustration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26134970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26134970