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Urgh, what a useless blogpost. Nearly devoid of any substantive comparisons, created only to stoke the flames of fandom one way or the other. First, no, Julia

Urgh, what a useless blogpost. Nearly devoid of any substantive comparisons, created only to stoke the flames of fandom one way or the other. First, no, Julia is not threatening Python any time soon. _If_ Julia ever overtakes Python, it will take a decade, at least. The inertia is just too large, and it's exacerbated by the people who use Python: Beginners who just want a big community and plentiful learning resources, and people who need large, existing libraries. These libraries and tutorials take a long time to make, and big companies haven't even _started_ investing in Julia. They probably should, and I hope they do, but in any case, it's way too early to imply Julia threatens the crown. Second, the whole "Zen of Python versus the Greed of Julia" is misleading. All programming languages make tradeoffs in their design, Julia included. Julia has managed to settle on a design with remarkably many advantages, but there are still many drawbacks. Just go to any Hacker News thread on Julia and watch people complain about all the things Julia doesn't do well. Third, it annoys me that some people keep saying Julia is faster than C. No, it isn't. It's generally slower, but in the same ballpark. It's fast enough that you never have to go to another language for speed, but it's _not_ faster than C. Then there's this quote: "But in contrast to Python, you can introduce static types if you like — in the way they are present in C or Fortran, for example". This bugs me, because Julia is still dynamic, even when it has type annotations. It's just throw an error if the type annotations are incorrect. To me at least, that's not static in the same way as static languages. Look, Julia is great. About one year ago I switched completely from Python to Julia at my job, and it's been a nice experience. But there is little use for these low-effort posts that don't really persuade anyone.

disgruntledphd2 5y ago
> Third, it annoys me that some people keep saying Julia is faster than C. No, it isn't. It's generally slower, but in the same ballpark. It's fast enough that you never have to go to another language for speed, but it's _not_ faster than C. But that's definitely good enough for an awful lot of numeric work. Personally, I kinda like Julia because it's a little closer to R, and I hate hate hate doing analytical work in Python (ML/programming in the larger is fine). I do agree that this is a terrible blogpost though, but Julia does have some advantages. I wanted to start evangelising it when it was 1.0, but that was not a great launch (IMO, obviously). They did it a little too quickly, before all the library authors had updated.

disgruntledphd2 5y ago

> Third, it annoys me that some people keep saying Julia is faster than C. No, it isn't. It's generally slower, but in the same ballpark. It's fast enough that you never have to go to another language for speed, but it's _not_ faster than C. But that's definitely good enough for an awful lot of numeric work. Personally, I kinda like Julia because it's a little closer to R, and I hate hate hate doing analytical work in Python (ML/programming in the larger is fine). I do agree that this is a terrible blogpost though, but Julia does have some advantages. I wanted to start evangelising it when it was 1.0, but that was not a great launch (IMO, obviously). They did it a little too quickly, before all the library authors had updated.