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It's really easy to try Julia by just downloading it: http://julialang.org/downloads/ http://julialang.org/downloads/. I'm becoming increasingly convinced that

by Blahah 13y ago

It's really easy to try Julia by just downloading it: http://julialang.org/downloads/ http://julialang.org/downloads/. I'm becoming increasingly convinced that Julia is the future of technical computing. We've just started pulling together a BioJulia team - if anyone is interested drop an email (in profile).

vezzy-fnord 13y ago
Any reasoning behind such a generically bold statement?
- TheTurd 13y ago
  > Any reasoning behind such a generically bold statement? If and when they're right, they can smugly point out how forward thinking they were.
- RivieraKid 13y ago
  - Good performance - Lisp-like macros and other metaprogramming facilities - It's a general purpose language - Multiple dispatch - Designed for parallelism and distributed computation
sdegutis 13y ago
Honestly I'm convinced it's a lot more generally applicable than scientific computing. Much of heavy lifting I had to do in C, I can now do in Julia with nearly the same speed and efficiency. Plus, for a lot of the problems I would have chosen Python, Ruby, or even Clojure for, I could really see myself using Julia now.
- orangecat 13y ago
  Same here. In my so-far limited experience, it feels like the upgrade to Python 2 that I wish Python 3 had been.
- RivieraKid 13y ago
  +1 Besides libs and ecosystem in general, I don't see any advantage Python / Ruby / Clojure have over Julia.
  - sdegutis 13y ago
    And libs/tooling naturally come along with active use, which I think Julia is going to start seeing real soon. At least from me!
    - RivieraKid 13y ago
      I agree, the libs ecosystem is growing at an amazing pace (partly because macros make it easy to create wrappers around C, Python or Java libs).
  - jsofra 13y ago
    Eh, in the case of Closure pervasive immutability, I don't want to write imperative code anymore. I am sure you could write in a functional style in Julia but all the code I have seen seems to rely pretty heavily on explicit stateful loops. At that seems to be a design choice not just for speed but, from what I have read elsewhere, to be familiar to Fortran and Matlab people, seems like a bad trade off to me.
    - RivieraKid 13y ago
      Removing loops or mutability from Julia would be a terrible decision. There's nothing inherently wrong with mutability or imperative programming.
      - jsofra 13y ago
        I just was answering the case for the advantage of Clojure over Julia as a general purpose language. And pervasive immutability is an advantage in that case. I agree Julia needs mutable arrays, I think for the domain it is targeting mutable arrays are a must but that should not mean that it needs big old imperative loops absolutely everywhere either.
sdegutis 13y ago
I can see Julia replacing Go for a lot of people, specifically those who came from a Python or Ruby background and are using Go for the kind of things more typically written in those languages. I bet Julia will shine in this problem space.

by Blahah 13y ago

vezzy-fnord 13y ago

Any reasoning behind such a generically bold statement?

TheTurd 13y ago
> Any reasoning behind such a generically bold statement? If and when they're right, they can smugly point out how forward thinking they were.
RivieraKid 13y ago
- Good performance - Lisp-like macros and other metaprogramming facilities - It's a general purpose language - Multiple dispatch - Designed for parallelism and distributed computation

sdegutis 13y ago

Honestly I'm convinced it's a lot more generally applicable than scientific computing. Much of heavy lifting I had to do in C, I can now do in Julia with nearly the same speed and efficiency. Plus, for a lot of the problems I would have chosen Python, Ruby, or even Clojure for, I could really see myself using Julia now.

orangecat 13y ago
Same here. In my so-far limited experience, it feels like the upgrade to Python 2 that I wish Python 3 had been.
RivieraKid 13y ago
+1 Besides libs and ecosystem in general, I don't see any advantage Python / Ruby / Clojure have over Julia.
- sdegutis 13y ago
  And libs/tooling naturally come along with active use, which I think Julia is going to start seeing real soon. At least from me!
  - RivieraKid 13y ago
    I agree, the libs ecosystem is growing at an amazing pace (partly because macros make it easy to create wrappers around C, Python or Java libs).
- jsofra 13y ago
  Eh, in the case of Closure pervasive immutability, I don't want to write imperative code anymore. I am sure you could write in a functional style in Julia but all the code I have seen seems to rely pretty heavily on explicit stateful loops. At that seems to be a design choice not just for speed but, from what I have read elsewhere, to be familiar to Fortran and Matlab people, seems like a bad trade off to me.
  - RivieraKid 13y ago
    Removing loops or mutability from Julia would be a terrible decision. There's nothing inherently wrong with mutability or imperative programming.
    - jsofra 13y ago
      I just was answering the case for the advantage of Clojure over Julia as a general purpose language. And pervasive immutability is an advantage in that case. I agree Julia needs mutable arrays, I think for the domain it is targeting mutable arrays are a must but that should not mean that it needs big old imperative loops absolutely everywhere either.

sdegutis 13y ago

I can see Julia replacing Go for a lot of people, specifically those who came from a Python or Ruby background and are using Go for the kind of things more typically written in those languages. I bet Julia will shine in this problem space.