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I actually think Julia's behaviour (partially) copied from matlab is bad. I had to review a lot of matlab/Julia simulation code write by PhD/grad students (as w

I actually think Julia's behaviour (partially) copied from matlab is bad. I had to review a lot of matlab/Julia simulation code write by PhD/grad students (as well as my own) and most of the time when things somehow are not working debugging becomes a task of "find the missing dot". If they would have decided on a more obvious symbol (the dot is really just way too easy to overlook) for broadcasting it would be much better, but I still much prefer that broadcast and matrix operation would use entirely different operators/named functions. Instead we have the case that a little annotation can dramatically change the behaviour of the code (the matrix exponential is in fact a great example). That said I mainly work with fields and calculus so I might be biased because the majority of operations are broadcast and I only rarely use matrix operations.

tomsmeding 2y ago
The nice thing is that if this dot-approach (or some other syntax with a similar effect) were implemented in Futhark, then because Futhark is statically-typed, all mismatches would be compile-time errors. Those are very hard to overlook :)
- setopt 2y ago
  In the very common case of square matrices, I think the dotted and non-dotted operations are generally both valid?
  - iav 2y ago
    They might be both valid but will generate a different output (int or range) leading to a compile time error downstream
    - cycomanic 2y ago
      I don't think that's generally the case, AFAIK the example of the matrix exponential example a bit further up would not be really distinguishable as a type from a regular matrix (with exponential elements).
setopt 2y ago
> most of the time when things somehow are not working debugging becomes a task of "find the missing dot". If they would have decided on a more obvious symbo I guess you could use your editor’s highlight-regexp function to make the dots more obvious during debugging :) I personally like the dots because they’re so unintrusive, but I work in a field where most operations are matrix operations, so perhaps you’re right…

tomsmeding 2y ago

The nice thing is that if this dot-approach (or some other syntax with a similar effect) were implemented in Futhark, then because Futhark is statically-typed, all mismatches would be compile-time errors. Those are very hard to overlook :)

setopt 2y ago
In the very common case of square matrices, I think the dotted and non-dotted operations are generally both valid?
- iav 2y ago
  They might be both valid but will generate a different output (int or range) leading to a compile time error downstream
  - cycomanic 2y ago
    I don't think that's generally the case, AFAIK the example of the matrix exponential example a bit further up would not be really distinguishable as a type from a regular matrix (with exponential elements).

setopt 2y ago

> most of the time when things somehow are not working debugging becomes a task of "find the missing dot". If they would have decided on a more obvious symbo I guess you could use your editor’s highlight-regexp function to make the dots more obvious during debugging :) I personally like the dots because they’re so unintrusive, but I work in a field where most operations are matrix operations, so perhaps you’re right…