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But Julia is a really young language, drawing that comparison is a bit premature, be more interesting to look at that in 2-4 years time

by rdc12 12y ago

ForHackernews 12y ago
Julia is incredible, but I worry about its future because, unlike some other promising-but-not-quite-mature languages like Go or Rust, Julia doesn't have any kind of corporate or organizational patron promoting it and investing big money in it.
- rdc12 12y ago
  And yet it has created a remarkable amount of buzz around it already
- Derbasti 12y ago
  Isn't it being developed by the MIT? I'm not sure about "big" money, but it sure is being backed.
  - ForHackernews 12y ago
    AFAIK, it doesn't have any kind of official institutional backing from MIT. Some of the creators are MIT faculty, but I don't think that makes it "An MIT Project" in the way that Go is a Google Project.
- grayclhn 12y ago
  True, but unlike Go or Rust, it probably only needs to be better than Matlab to have a successful future.
  - ForHackernews 12y ago
    That might be true, but I think they're also targeting some of the R / NumPy market. Those are both pretty mature, and it could be hard to make inroads.
    - grayclhn 12y ago
      Definitely. My (indirect) point was that scientific computing is a much less competitive area than Go and Rust are targeting. And I can imagine a world where NumPy, R, and Julia are all strong projects. Arguably, lack of commercial support is a bigger problem for mature projects than young projects. Whether or not Julia pulls away users from R probably has more to do with how much R adapts to new directions in statistics than with anything Julia does (assuming that julia passes a minimum threshold of credibility, which it probably doesn't yet for most statisticians.) A lot of my interest in julia comes from a specific simulation that I need to run to prototype a new estimator that would be infeasible in straight R. If R were faster, I wouldn't bother.... (To preempt the obvious reply, I could always write the slow part in C. But if I need to introduce a different language anyway, why not look at other options?)

But Julia is a really young language, drawing that comparison is a bit premature, be more interesting to look at that in 2-4 years time

by rdc12 12y ago

But Julia is a really young language, drawing that comparison is a bit premature, be more interesting to look at that in 2-4 years time

ForHackernews 12y ago

Julia is incredible, but I worry about its future because, unlike some other promising-but-not-quite-mature languages like Go or Rust, Julia doesn't have any kind of corporate or organizational patron promoting it and investing big money in it.

rdc12 12y ago
And yet it has created a remarkable amount of buzz around it already
Derbasti 12y ago
Isn't it being developed by the MIT? I'm not sure about "big" money, but it sure is being backed.
- ForHackernews 12y ago
  AFAIK, it doesn't have any kind of official institutional backing from MIT. Some of the creators are MIT faculty, but I don't think that makes it "An MIT Project" in the way that Go is a Google Project.
grayclhn 12y ago
True, but unlike Go or Rust, it probably only needs to be better than Matlab to have a successful future.
- ForHackernews 12y ago
  That might be true, but I think they're also targeting some of the R / NumPy market. Those are both pretty mature, and it could be hard to make inroads.
  - grayclhn 12y ago
    Definitely. My (indirect) point was that scientific computing is a much less competitive area than Go and Rust are targeting. And I can imagine a world where NumPy, R, and Julia are all strong projects. Arguably, lack of commercial support is a bigger problem for mature projects than young projects. Whether or not Julia pulls away users from R probably has more to do with how much R adapts to new directions in statistics than with anything Julia does (assuming that julia passes a minimum threshold of credibility, which it probably doesn't yet for most statisticians.) A lot of my interest in julia comes from a specific simulation that I need to run to prototype a new estimator that would be infeasible in straight R. If R were faster, I wouldn't bother.... (To preempt the obvious reply, I could always write the slow part in C. But if I need to introduce a different language anyway, why not look at other options?)