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> when creating sophisticated large computational packages, the level of interoperability that Julia provides is both incredibly empowering and as of yet unsurp

by kgwgk 4y ago

> when creating sophisticated large computational packages, the level of interoperability that Julia provides is both incredibly empowering and as of yet unsurpassed It's difficult for outsiders to know what to think when confronted with so divergent opinions: "I would hit bugs of this severity often enough to make me question the correctness of any moderately complex computation in Julia. This was particularly true when trying a novel combination of packages or functions — composing together functionality from multiple sources was a significant source of bugs."

krastanov 4y ago
That is a very reasonable complaint, and I think the core devs (of the language and of the flagship ecosystem projects) take it fairly seriously. For me personally, it has been incredibly empowering to be able to mix and match very diverse packages, but maybe I am just used to defensive coding: I start with tests, including randomized tests and contract tests. On the other hand, though, I have not encountered more bugs in the Julia ecosystem than in the Sympy or Theano (deprecated now) or Tensorflow or Pytorch systems when I was using them to build "sophisticated large computational packages". Maybe the happy users are just not as vocal, but that is a silly excuse.
sundarurfriend 4y ago
Both opinions go hand in hand, in fact. Julia allows packages to interoperate in a way most other mainstream languages simply don't, due to the combination of its multiple dispatch and the type hierarchy. The fact that the language allows this interoperability to such level is very useful and empowering. But making proper use of this interoperablity means writing careful generic code that doesn't make narrow assumptions based only on currently known uses of it. Different parts of the ecosystem do this with different degress of care and success, with newer ones being better at it as lessons are learned and implemented. Yuri happened to work on parts of the ecosystem that were not-so-new, and made combinations that hadn't been commonly attempted. That doesn't mean that these weren't issues that need fixing and preventing in the future, for sure. But hitting bugs of this severity often isn't the typical experience for the average user - if it was, Julia would hardly have as many users, much less ones like NASA.

by kgwgk 4y ago

krastanov 4y ago

That is a very reasonable complaint, and I think the core devs (of the language and of the flagship ecosystem projects) take it fairly seriously. For me personally, it has been incredibly empowering to be able to mix and match very diverse packages, but maybe I am just used to defensive coding: I start with tests, including randomized tests and contract tests. On the other hand, though, I have not encountered more bugs in the Julia ecosystem than in the Sympy or Theano (deprecated now) or Tensorflow or Pytorch systems when I was using them to build "sophisticated large computational packages". Maybe the happy users are just not as vocal, but that is a silly excuse.

sundarurfriend 4y ago

Both opinions go hand in hand, in fact. Julia allows packages to interoperate in a way most other mainstream languages simply don't, due to the combination of its multiple dispatch and the type hierarchy. The fact that the language allows this interoperability to such level is very useful and empowering. But making proper use of this interoperablity means writing careful generic code that doesn't make narrow assumptions based only on currently known uses of it. Different parts of the ecosystem do this with different degress of care and success, with newer ones being better at it as lessons are learned and implemented. Yuri happened to work on parts of the ecosystem that were not-so-new, and made combinations that hadn't been commonly attempted. That doesn't mean that these weren't issues that need fixing and preventing in the future, for sure. But hitting bugs of this severity often isn't the typical experience for the average user - if it was, Julia would hardly have as many users, much less ones like NASA.