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Not surprising Julia is DARPA sponsored. Julia has a big future ahead of itself in the military and government. It has perhaps more of a future than any other m

Not surprising Julia is DARPA sponsored. Julia has a big future ahead of itself in the military and government. It has perhaps more of a future than any other modern language in those industries.

parktheredcar 13y ago
Why do you say that? I'd like to learn more.
- penland 13y ago
  The difference between the high quality math guys and the high quality distributed jocks at that level is much larger than I think most people think. I come from the engineer side, and it's really bizarre to hear people w/ Ph.D.s in machine learning or physics give talks where they will mess up what is really a junior level distributed programming concept. Happened twice at Strata that I saw. Mind you, that's for BASIC things, not someone trying to right a highly concurrent computational system across hundreds of nodes. No lie, I had a conversation with a machine learn jock that asked me point blank when we couldn't make Matlab go faster. On the flip side, the distributed engineers might even be worse at the math than the data jocks are at programming. A middling concept for a machine learning guy, like say a Bayes error, is like trying to write concurrent state machine in assembly. tl;dr - the pool of people that are both elite math jocks and elite system jocks is vanishingly small, as in I would be shocked if that number was out of the triple digits world wide. Julia has a lot of promise in that it gives the math guys familiar syntax, but appears to have the underlying capability to be very fast on shared memory architecture. It's already got the handles to call out to python / C / Fortran bindings.
  - wavefunction 13y ago
    Thanks for a great post!
rdtsc 13y ago
> Julia has a big future ahead of itself in the military and government. Hmm, curious, why would that be? Or rather, what are the features that make you think Julia has that other languages and technologies don't have that would be killed in military and government? I work within that area and if anything the military and government love their red tape, certifications, protection profiles, rubber stamps that it would seem like the last industry to jump on a new and largely yet unproven language. You wouldn't believe the number of Windows XP and RHEL 4 and 5 servers still running.
- scriptproof 13y ago
  The list of features is impressive: http://julialang.org/ http://julialang.org/. Concurrency, metaprogramming, efficient macros, generics, etc...
  - nn3 13y ago
    Too many features in a language sounds like a bad thing to me. Anyone remembers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/I http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/I Trying to be everything to everyone just makes you lose focus and causes too much complexity. Better to be lean and mean and somewhat specialized

Not surprising Julia is DARPA sponsored. Julia has a big future ahead of itself in the military and government. It has perhaps more of a future than any other modern language in those industries.

parktheredcar 13y ago

Why do you say that? I'd like to learn more.

penland 13y ago
The difference between the high quality math guys and the high quality distributed jocks at that level is much larger than I think most people think. I come from the engineer side, and it's really bizarre to hear people w/ Ph.D.s in machine learning or physics give talks where they will mess up what is really a junior level distributed programming concept. Happened twice at Strata that I saw. Mind you, that's for BASIC things, not someone trying to right a highly concurrent computational system across hundreds of nodes. No lie, I had a conversation with a machine learn jock that asked me point blank when we couldn't make Matlab go faster. On the flip side, the distributed engineers might even be worse at the math than the data jocks are at programming. A middling concept for a machine learning guy, like say a Bayes error, is like trying to write concurrent state machine in assembly. tl;dr - the pool of people that are both elite math jocks and elite system jocks is vanishingly small, as in I would be shocked if that number was out of the triple digits world wide. Julia has a lot of promise in that it gives the math guys familiar syntax, but appears to have the underlying capability to be very fast on shared memory architecture. It's already got the handles to call out to python / C / Fortran bindings.
- wavefunction 13y ago
  Thanks for a great post!

rdtsc 13y ago

> Julia has a big future ahead of itself in the military and government. Hmm, curious, why would that be? Or rather, what are the features that make you think Julia has that other languages and technologies don't have that would be killed in military and government? I work within that area and if anything the military and government love their red tape, certifications, protection profiles, rubber stamps that it would seem like the last industry to jump on a new and largely yet unproven language. You wouldn't believe the number of Windows XP and RHEL 4 and 5 servers still running.

scriptproof 13y ago
The list of features is impressive: http://julialang.org/ http://julialang.org/. Concurrency, metaprogramming, efficient macros, generics, etc...
- nn3 13y ago
  Too many features in a language sounds like a bad thing to me. Anyone remembers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/I http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/I Trying to be everything to everyone just makes you lose focus and causes too much complexity. Better to be lean and mean and somewhat specialized