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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

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
- cbkeller 5y ago
  > 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? Look, everyone wants static compilation, and it's almost certainly going to happen eventually. It's not unreasonable at all to want that. The only thing that would be unreasonable is to (apparently repeatedly!) imply or assert that this lack of static compilation (and/or better caching) is due to some bizarre perversion on the part of the community. If you want it to happen faster, then stop complaining about it on HN, get familiar with the current attempts at true static compilation in e.g. https://github.com/tshort/StaticCompiler.jl/pull/46 https://github.com/tshort/StaticCompiler.jl/pull/46 and start contributing yourself.
  - jampekka 5y ago
    I don't especially want a static compiler. I'm fairly happy with Python workflow even though it's totally dynamic and interpreted, but it's dog slow on numerical stuff and the design is showing its age. I like the "AOT-JIT" approach of Julia, and I think a separate compilation step is quite a stupid idea in the first place. I see it as some historical relic from computers with extremely limited memory (by current standards) and outdated business models that want obfuscated binaries. My main gripe is just that I have to do it every time I run anything if I'm not using a REPL/Notebook, which drive me insane with their inconsistent and opaque global state. This could be solved mostly by caching the compilation results and compiling new stuff incrementally. But I'm starting to lose any hope that this is gonna actually happen. Some lesser stuff follows from lack of this, but they should be relatively easily fixed.
- acmj 5y ago
  Couldn't agree more. What you said is a design flaw that the Julia community keeps denying. The Julia community also behaves defensively when it comes to performance. They refuse to accept that Julia doesn't compete with C/Rust on many non-numeric tasks in the real world. In addition, the Julia community has its own circle, its own style to write code. They will trash your code even if it is efficient and logically correct. I once compared implementations in different languages and found Julia is slower than others. Several of them jumped at me, criticized my coding style and blamed me for their fault. But in the end they couldn't improve the performance. At the Julia discourse, I was alone in the argument. That was a really bad experience.

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

cbkeller 5y ago
> 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? Look, everyone wants static compilation, and it's almost certainly going to happen eventually. It's not unreasonable at all to want that. The only thing that would be unreasonable is to (apparently repeatedly!) imply or assert that this lack of static compilation (and/or better caching) is due to some bizarre perversion on the part of the community. If you want it to happen faster, then stop complaining about it on HN, get familiar with the current attempts at true static compilation in e.g. https://github.com/tshort/StaticCompiler.jl/pull/46 https://github.com/tshort/StaticCompiler.jl/pull/46 and start contributing yourself.
- jampekka 5y ago
  I don't especially want a static compiler. I'm fairly happy with Python workflow even though it's totally dynamic and interpreted, but it's dog slow on numerical stuff and the design is showing its age. I like the "AOT-JIT" approach of Julia, and I think a separate compilation step is quite a stupid idea in the first place. I see it as some historical relic from computers with extremely limited memory (by current standards) and outdated business models that want obfuscated binaries. My main gripe is just that I have to do it every time I run anything if I'm not using a REPL/Notebook, which drive me insane with their inconsistent and opaque global state. This could be solved mostly by caching the compilation results and compiling new stuff incrementally. But I'm starting to lose any hope that this is gonna actually happen. Some lesser stuff follows from lack of this, but they should be relatively easily fixed.
acmj 5y ago
Couldn't agree more. What you said is a design flaw that the Julia community keeps denying. The Julia community also behaves defensively when it comes to performance. They refuse to accept that Julia doesn't compete with C/Rust on many non-numeric tasks in the real world. In addition, the Julia community has its own circle, its own style to write code. They will trash your code even if it is efficient and logically correct. I once compared implementations in different languages and found Julia is slower than others. Several of them jumped at me, criticized my coding style and blamed me for their fault. But in the end they couldn't improve the performance. At the Julia discourse, I was alone in the argument. That was a really bad experience.