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Julia was a scientific computing language made by scientific computing experts. They did a great job on some things, but whiffed a few major decisions early on.

affinepplan 2y ago
It's a general purpose language made by experts in a myriad of subjects.
- catgary 2y ago
  I’m sorry, but I’m going to disagree with you on that. Can you point to any of the language designers who had a background in programming language theory? The closest thing I see is Bezanson’s work on technical computing, which seems laser-focused on array programming. I don’t really see anything related to types or program transformations.
nsajko 2y ago
> whiffed a few major decisions early on Anything particular in mind?
- patrick451 2y ago
  The always on jit was a big mistep (IMO, the opt-in torchscript model is much better). I tried a julia a few times and it was just too slow to be usable for anything remotely exploratory. Every year or so, I'd read "TTFP has been improved", so I'd try again and it was still slow as mollasas in siberia. I suspect a lot of people had that experience and will be hard pressed to give julia a real shot at this point, even it it does/has fix the problem.
- catgary 2y ago
  In general, I’d say there’s too much superficial flexibility but not enough control. - I wrote this elsewhere: I find their approach to memory management/mutable arrays really hits the worst of both worlds (manual memory management and garbage collection). You end up trying to preallocate memory but don’t actually have control over memory allocations. I find the dynamic type system exacerbates this. - It’s a very big language, even in the IR. So proper program transforms like mapping functions or autograd are quite difficult to implement. - Static compilation is really hard, which makes it a non-starter for a lot of domains where it could have made inroads (robotics, games, etc).
  - xgdgsc 2y ago
    Static compilation is already available in a commercial product: https://discourse.julialang.org/t/syslabcc-suzhou-tongyuans-proprietary-julia-aot-compiler-is-now-available-for-free-use-personal-educational-license-only/114633 https://discourse.julialang.org/t/syslabcc-suzhou-tongyuans-... . https://github.com/Suzhou-Tongyuan/syslab-deploy https://github.com/Suzhou-Tongyuan/syslab-deploy . EDIT: or 2 products: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42962548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42962548

affinepplan 2y ago

It's a general purpose language made by experts in a myriad of subjects.

catgary 2y ago
I’m sorry, but I’m going to disagree with you on that. Can you point to any of the language designers who had a background in programming language theory? The closest thing I see is Bezanson’s work on technical computing, which seems laser-focused on array programming. I don’t really see anything related to types or program transformations.

nsajko 2y ago

> whiffed a few major decisions early on Anything particular in mind?

patrick451 2y ago
The always on jit was a big mistep (IMO, the opt-in torchscript model is much better). I tried a julia a few times and it was just too slow to be usable for anything remotely exploratory. Every year or so, I'd read "TTFP has been improved", so I'd try again and it was still slow as mollasas in siberia. I suspect a lot of people had that experience and will be hard pressed to give julia a real shot at this point, even it it does/has fix the problem.
catgary 2y ago
In general, I’d say there’s too much superficial flexibility but not enough control. - I wrote this elsewhere: I find their approach to memory management/mutable arrays really hits the worst of both worlds (manual memory management and garbage collection). You end up trying to preallocate memory but don’t actually have control over memory allocations. I find the dynamic type system exacerbates this. - It’s a very big language, even in the IR. So proper program transforms like mapping functions or autograd are quite difficult to implement. - Static compilation is really hard, which makes it a non-starter for a lot of domains where it could have made inroads (robotics, games, etc).
- xgdgsc 2y ago
  Static compilation is already available in a commercial product: https://discourse.julialang.org/t/syslabcc-suzhou-tongyuans-proprietary-julia-aot-compiler-is-now-available-for-free-use-personal-educational-license-only/114633 https://discourse.julialang.org/t/syslabcc-suzhou-tongyuans-... . https://github.com/Suzhou-Tongyuan/syslab-deploy https://github.com/Suzhou-Tongyuan/syslab-deploy . EDIT: or 2 products: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42962548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42962548