4 ms·

Videos from the Julia tutorial at MIT

71 points by ViralBShah 14y ago

shared4you 14y ago
I just saw that you have a run() command for invoking the shell. Would be cool to just use ! (like Matlab) or %%! (like IPython). BTW, the lightning round is awesome. Thanks विराळ् :)
- StefanKarpinski 14y ago
  The ! operator already has a meaning, which is negation. There are also many different ways to run pipelines: `run` just runs it, letting output pass through to stdout/stderr and returning nothing, but raising an error if the process fails; `success` suppresses process output and returns true or false based on the return status of the pipeline; there are also various ways of reading from and writing to pipelines, or starting pipelines asynchronously and letting them run in the background. So using ! for just one of these many ways of running external programs seems short-sighted.
  - ViralBShah 14y ago
    Within `run`, you still can use nice syntactic sugar such as `|` for pipes. BTW, almost correct rendering of my name in Devanagari! :-)
klrr 14y ago
Julia looks a bit like Lua.
- StefanKarpinski 14y ago
  There are superficial similarities. The main things that make Julia different than other dynamic languages are: 1. The expressive, sophisticated type system 2. Using multiple dispatch as its core paradigm 3. Extreme interoperability with C libraries 4. C-like performance Of course, LuaJIT gets great performance too, so that's actually rather similar to Lua. Lua also isn't nearly as naturally suited to scientific programming.
  - BruceM 14y ago
    Those 4 bullet points all sound a lot like Dylan (http://opendylan.org/ http://opendylan.org/). I'd have said Common Lisp as well, but some might argue point #1 with respect to that. It is nice to see others (re-)discovering the joy of full on multiple dispatch though!
    - pjmlp 14y ago
      Reading the new Dylan documentation makes me wonder how if would have turned out if Apple invested more strongly in the language. An expressive dynamic language with repl and native code compilers. quite nice. The one thing so far that I don't like is <> around identifiers.
      - cgay 14y ago
        < > is a naming convention for types (e.g., classes) only.
        pjmlp 14y ago
        I know, but still makes the code ugly to my liking.
  - sixbrx 14y ago
    I've been using Julia for my thesis research lately, and I find multiple dispatch to be a great match for writing mathematical algorithms, especially because of the ad-hoc specialization that it allows based on all parameter types. OO approaches always seemed weird for this sort of thing, where you'd have to decide which type "owns" the ability of how to work with the other types. What I wish for: - faster lambdas and which capture numbers as values not as addresses. I left Python over the latter, it caught me up all the time. At least Julia developers don't consider it a feature and plan to fix it. - to be able to specify function domain and range types, for documentation and sanity checking - maybe some improvements in comprehensions would be nice, so I could have an Array of Arrays of something e.g.. Currently the [x for...] comprehensions tend to collapse things together while the {x for ...} comprehensions tend to lose the types of what's inside. Overall a great language already and a positive experience.
lincolnq 14y ago
Julia is a huge step forward in practical programming languages. I was super impressed when I saw it at Strange Loop last year, and they've made strides since then.
shared4you 14y ago
Couple more suggestions: 1. In the REPL, highlighting of matching parenthesis/brackets (like in CLISP) would be good. 2. In the top-level Makefile, add a target "make distclean" to mean "make cleanall". distclean is the "GNU standard" [1]. Similarly "make mostlyclean" could clean everything except major dependencies. [1] http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Standard-Targets.html http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Standard-T...
- ViralBShah 14y ago
  These are both good points. We did use to have a distclean, but seems to have been lost in various build system updates. Matching parentheses/brackets in the REPL would be really nice too. Can one do this with readline? It would be great if you could file an issue - just trying to nudge you into joining the fun. :-)
  - shared4you 14y ago
    I created a GitHub account just for Julia, and the issue 2738 is here: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/2738 https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/2738

71 points by ViralBShah 14y ago

I just saw that you have a run() command for invoking the shell. Would be cool to just use ! (like Matlab) or %%! (like IPython). BTW, the lightning round is awesome. Thanks विराळ् :)

StefanKarpinski 14y ago
The ! operator already has a meaning, which is negation. There are also many different ways to run pipelines: `run` just runs it, letting output pass through to stdout/stderr and returning nothing, but raising an error if the process fails; `success` suppresses process output and returns true or false based on the return status of the pipeline; there are also various ways of reading from and writing to pipelines, or starting pipelines asynchronously and letting them run in the background. So using ! for just one of these many ways of running external programs seems short-sighted.
- ViralBShah 14y ago
  Within `run`, you still can use nice syntactic sugar such as `|` for pipes. BTW, almost correct rendering of my name in Devanagari! :-)

klrr 14y ago

Julia looks a bit like Lua.

StefanKarpinski 14y ago
There are superficial similarities. The main things that make Julia different than other dynamic languages are: 1. The expressive, sophisticated type system 2. Using multiple dispatch as its core paradigm 3. Extreme interoperability with C libraries 4. C-like performance Of course, LuaJIT gets great performance too, so that's actually rather similar to Lua. Lua also isn't nearly as naturally suited to scientific programming.
- BruceM 14y ago
  Those 4 bullet points all sound a lot like Dylan (http://opendylan.org/ http://opendylan.org/). I'd have said Common Lisp as well, but some might argue point #1 with respect to that. It is nice to see others (re-)discovering the joy of full on multiple dispatch though!
  - pjmlp 14y ago
    Reading the new Dylan documentation makes me wonder how if would have turned out if Apple invested more strongly in the language. An expressive dynamic language with repl and native code compilers. quite nice. The one thing so far that I don't like is <> around identifiers.
    - cgay 14y ago
      < > is a naming convention for types (e.g., classes) only.
      - pjmlp 14y ago
        I know, but still makes the code ugly to my liking.
- sixbrx 14y ago
  I've been using Julia for my thesis research lately, and I find multiple dispatch to be a great match for writing mathematical algorithms, especially because of the ad-hoc specialization that it allows based on all parameter types. OO approaches always seemed weird for this sort of thing, where you'd have to decide which type "owns" the ability of how to work with the other types. What I wish for: - faster lambdas and which capture numbers as values not as addresses. I left Python over the latter, it caught me up all the time. At least Julia developers don't consider it a feature and plan to fix it. - to be able to specify function domain and range types, for documentation and sanity checking - maybe some improvements in comprehensions would be nice, so I could have an Array of Arrays of something e.g.. Currently the [x for...] comprehensions tend to collapse things together while the {x for ...} comprehensions tend to lose the types of what's inside. Overall a great language already and a positive experience.

lincolnq 14y ago

Julia is a huge step forward in practical programming languages. I was super impressed when I saw it at Strange Loop last year, and they've made strides since then.

shared4you 14y ago

Couple more suggestions: 1. In the REPL, highlighting of matching parenthesis/brackets (like in CLISP) would be good. 2. In the top-level Makefile, add a target "make distclean" to mean "make cleanall". distclean is the "GNU standard" [1]. Similarly "make mostlyclean" could clean everything except major dependencies. [1] http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Standard-Targets.html http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Standard-T...

ViralBShah 14y ago
These are both good points. We did use to have a distclean, but seems to have been lost in various build system updates. Matching parentheses/brackets in the REPL would be really nice too. Can one do this with readline? It would be great if you could file an issue - just trying to nudge you into joining the fun. :-)
- shared4you 14y ago
  I created a GitHub account just for Julia, and the issue 2738 is here: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/2738 https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/2738