ScottPJones

5 ms·

1.
by ScottPJones 6y ago
Complaining about 1-based indexing in Julia is so... 4 years old! Just use OffsetArrays, and you can use 0 based, or whatever base floats your boat (start underwater with -5, for example!)
2.
by ScottPJones 6y ago
Back 5.5 years ago, I used to complain about the 1 based indexing and the column-major structure of matrices in Julia (both like Fortran), however, those issues have been solved by OffsetArrays and PermutedDimsArrays, giving far more flexib
3.
by ScottPJones 6y ago
One thing that is pretty great about Pluto.jl, is how responsive the author is (Fons van der Plas, or @fonsp on GitHub). I've been able to get great suggestions from him (as well as the fast growing community of Pluto users) on Zulip d
4.
by ScottPJones 6y ago
I've also switched to using Pluto, shortly after seeing the presentation during JuliaCon. It is still rough around the edges, but I've found it a lot easier to deal with than Jupyter, quite frankly.
5.
by ScottPJones 6y ago
You'll also save a lot of effort in future endeavors, IMO. Remember, once you've switched to Julia, Python is still only a `using PyCall` and `pyimport` away!
6.
by ScottPJones 6y ago
I'm having a lot of fun with Pluto.jl and PlutoUI.jl this past week, it's so easy to use and add interactivity. There are still some rough edges, but that's what PRs are made for!
7.
by ScottPJones 6y ago
Very good article - mentoring Julia over the last 5 years, I've run into a lot of these things.
8.
by ScottPJones 7y ago
I haven't seen that at all - many Julia programmers are (or were) also Python programmers. I think there is a lot of respect in the Julia community for Python & the Python ecosystem. There have even been a number of Julia talks at
9.
by ScottPJones 7y ago
Python's ecosystem is great - but Julia's is growing incredibly fast, and in some cases Julia has already surpassed what is available in other languages (for example, take a look at the whole differential equations ecosystem: htt
10.
by ScottPJones 7y ago
I've been using Julia for non-scientific computing programs for almost 5 years now, and (especially now that it is stable since the 1.0 release) have found it well suited for general programming as well. Having a language that is easy
11.
by ScottPJones 7y ago
I've been programming in the Julia language for the past 4.5 years, and as somebody who has lived through the problems with Julia's name (getting incessantly teased by coworkers, friends, even my wife and kids, because of how much
12.
by ScottPJones 8y ago
Since many C and C++ implementations use LLVM, which Julia also does, it is frequently the case where C/C++ code and Julia code when fully optimized end up performing almost identically. However, what makes me love Julia is the progra
13.
by ScottPJones 8y ago
I've actually seen many cases where overuse of concrete types (on function parameters) in Julia can lead to poor performance. For example, if functions are written declaring an argument as `Vector{Int64}`, and then people using the fun
14.
by ScottPJones 8y ago
Yes, if you want stability, you should never use a x.0 or x.0.0 release (even from a big company - how many people remember Windows 3.0? ) I, however, am a bit crazy, and enjoy living on the bleeding edge, and so am up late tonight hacking
15.
by ScottPJones 8y ago
As someone who's spent decades programming in C/C++, and diving into assembly code (and writing a fair share when the compiler just couldn't do what I needed), I love being able to directly inspect the output code at many lev
16.
by ScottPJones 8y ago
I've seen quite an evolution over the past 3.4 years I've been using Julia and the 4 JuliaCon's I've attended so far. Back at the 2015 JuliaCon, a number of us "older" professional programmers felt like we shou
17.
by ScottPJones 8y ago
I complained also about the "cowboy" culture I saw among the Julia developers when I first started with it (people making a change directly to master, or merging there own PR without giving time for people around the world to revi
18.
by ScottPJones 8y ago
Three years ago, when I found out about Julia (and quickly fell in love with the language), I not happy at all about the 1-based indices and column-major storage, and at the time, a lot of the responses I got were along the lines of "J
19.
by ScottPJones 8y ago
Not true necessarily, especially with a stable v1.0 coming out this summer. I've worked on two separate commercial products using Julia over the last 3 years already. The changes between the big releases made things difficult at times,
20.
by ScottPJones 8y ago
Why does it have be one or the other? I think the two of them can be rather complementary. Julia does very well at calling libraries with a C ABI, and Rust can be used instead of C or Fortran, if you really need to (although, in over 3 year
21.
by ScottPJones 8y ago
I do have to be aware of the GC, and try to use techniques to avoid lots of allocation. I haven't needed much in the way of fine-grained control of memory, what sorts of things were you looking for? A lot of that "rich runtime&quo
22.
by ScottPJones 8y ago
Sometimes languages get stuck by their history, and (without really becoming a rather different incompatible language) the only way forward is to start from scratch. Also, Julia is good at letting you use those old ecosystems, C and Fortran
23.
by ScottPJones 8y ago
I wouldn't use that as a primary example (allowing integers to overflow), because one of the great things about Julia is that it is incredibly easy to define your own types that will simply work , that for example, do checked arithmet
24.
by ScottPJones 8y ago
I don't feel at all that it's a fair characterization of the overall community. I'm sure I've been the target of more of what Dan Luu experienced than anyone else in the Julia community, from the same source, but I have
25.
by ScottPJones 8y ago
What about using Cxx.jl? You can have a nice little REPL for your C++ code. I haven't seen pybind11, does it give you that ability?
26.
by ScottPJones 8y ago
He explained that at the beginning of his post - things like the Pkg changes are getting quite a lot of press already, he wanted to highlight the things that people might not have realized were coming in v0.7/v1.0.
27.
by ScottPJones 8y ago
I believe though that there is some work being done on actually directly interpreting the AST, in cases where going through all the work of generating LLVM IR and compiling that to native code is unnecessary, particularly when it is code th
28.
by ScottPJones 8y ago
Julia's JIT compilation is rather different than what is referred to as JIT compilation in other languages, such as Java or JavaScript, where the language is interpreted (which may be interpreting instructions from a virtual machine su
29.
by ScottPJones 8y ago
In some sense, it doesn't really need to compete with R, many times it's better just to use the R, Python, Java, C++, packages via RCall, PyCall, JavaCall, Cxx, or use the built-in ccall to use libraries written in any number of l
30.
by ScottPJones 8y ago
The creators of Julia have been focusing on technical, numerical, scientific computing first, however, the language was always intended to also be a good general purpose programming language (which it is) [I was lucky enough to attend Jeff

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