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When I was a grad student at MIT, my desk was across the hall from the Julia people. We even shared a lunch table. Julia is most famous for its optimizing compi
by drhagen 29d ago
When I was a grad student at MIT, my desk was across the hall from the Julia people. We even shared a lunch table. Julia is most famous for its optimizing compiler, but many people may not notice the careful work that went into designing the language itself. Matlab this was not! I remember one long conversation where one of them was teaching me about the different types of normalization of unicode. They had to pick one to canonicalize unicode variable names (more useful for a mathy programming language), and they were carefully considering the consequences of the options.
- bee_rider 29d agoI don’t know if experience has just damaged my brain or what, but I really like matlab’s syntax for what it is. Nice for writing 100 line experiments or using in the REPL. Sort of like the Python of linear algebra, haha. It also has a nice feature where you start getting headaches to let you know you’ve tried to extend it past its comfort zone. Julia seems to sit in this area between Matlab and Fortran where I can’t ever find a reason to learn it instead of just using one of the other two. But people seem to love it (and the GPGPU support sounds like it is good?) so I should probably just make up a reason.
- harshreality 28d agoJulia might just be the closest thing at the moment to Matlab without being a Matlab clone. I think you're overestimating the learning curve. It has a REPL, with tab completion and ?<funcname> for high-quality help (without resorting to a browser or llm).
- bee_rider 28d agoJust to be fully pedantic, Octave is the closest thing to being Matlab without being Matlab (and actually I use Octave). :)
- deleted 28d ago[deleted]