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If anything, Julia becoming popular with academics makes me extremely skeptical about its missing guardrails. Obviously anecdotal, but I have many years of expe
by NationalPark 5y ago
If anything, Julia becoming popular with academics makes me extremely skeptical about its missing guardrails. Obviously anecdotal, but I have many years of experience working with academics and statisticians and I know to be wary when they suddenly like a new technology. Usually it's because it makes it easier to swallow errors somehow, or because their friend wrote it and sent them an email about it.
- jakobnissen 5y agoHa! That's hilarious. Yeah, I've seen some real horrorshows of programming in my field. I think it's important to realize, though, that academics do have a special use-case when programming. That is, academics don't pick e.g. Python because they are bad programmers and don't know what they are doing, but because Python is a good fit for their needs. I see Julia as an excellent - near-perfect, in fact - academic programming language. That Julia excels at this use case does not mean it's bad at everything else.
- NationalPark 5y agoJust giving you a hard time... I do think the performance improvements alone make Julia a serious contender. I've seen a lot of valuable engineering time spent rewriting algorithms in C++ for scientists who know Python. To speed up their iteration loop without bringing in performance experts would be great.