3 ms·

I should also point out that I completely agree that is intrinsically difficult to design a language to have both the speed of C and the abstraction power of Li

I should also point out that I completely agree that is intrinsically difficult to design a language to have both the speed of C and the abstraction power of Lisp. That is part of why the job that Jeff Bezanson, who is largely responsible for Julia's amazing performance, has done is so incredible. It's hard to explain until you start using it, but ubiquitous, fast, expressive multiple dispatch is a truly amazing programming paradigm. I'm not entirely sure how it hasn't been adopted as the core paradigm of any mainstream language in the past.

dylangs1030 14y ago
Stefan, do you mind telling me what your programming background is? What languages did you come from before working on Julia? I'm going to look more into the documentation for it now.
- StefanKarpinski 14y ago
  Not at all. I've done a lot of C, Matlab, Perl, Ruby and R, although I've also dabbled in Java, JavaScript, C++, Scala and Python. Definitely a polyglot of "pragmatic" languages. Julia was influenced most strongly by Lisp (Scheme in particular), Matlab, C, Python, Ruby and Perl. If you (or anyone else reading this) have questions looking through the manual, drop an email to the julia-users@googlegroups.com list, or me personally.
  - crazydiamond 14y ago
    I have just started going through the docs a bit. I am interested in 2 things. One, programs that interface with other commands -- essentially rewriting large shell programs in a "better" language. I saw the section on "external commands" and that looks very promising. Are there any other links or sample programs I can check out. Would Julia be just as good as say Ruby in this respect ? Is there a readline interface ? Second, I haven't yet come across an ncurses interface yet. Thanks. edit: Just came across your article "Shelling out sucks". | In my followup post, I will describe how Julia makes constructing and executing pipelines of external commands as safe as Python’s subprocess and as convenient as shelling out. I could not find a link to the followup. Do you have something ?

dylangs1030 14y ago

Stefan, do you mind telling me what your programming background is? What languages did you come from before working on Julia? I'm going to look more into the documentation for it now.

StefanKarpinski 14y ago
Not at all. I've done a lot of C, Matlab, Perl, Ruby and R, although I've also dabbled in Java, JavaScript, C++, Scala and Python. Definitely a polyglot of "pragmatic" languages. Julia was influenced most strongly by Lisp (Scheme in particular), Matlab, C, Python, Ruby and Perl. If you (or anyone else reading this) have questions looking through the manual, drop an email to the julia-users@googlegroups.com list, or me personally.
- crazydiamond 14y ago
  I have just started going through the docs a bit. I am interested in 2 things. One, programs that interface with other commands -- essentially rewriting large shell programs in a "better" language. I saw the section on "external commands" and that looks very promising. Are there any other links or sample programs I can check out. Would Julia be just as good as say Ruby in this respect ? Is there a readline interface ? Second, I haven't yet come across an ncurses interface yet. Thanks. edit: Just came across your article "Shelling out sucks". | In my followup post, I will describe how Julia makes constructing and executing pipelines of external commands as safe as Python’s subprocess and as convenient as shelling out. I could not find a link to the followup. Do you have something ?