cbkeller

17 ms·

121.
by cbkeller 6y ago
Thanks, this actually explains the "turning" component of the bank effect much more intuitively (to me anyways).
122.
by cbkeller 6y ago
I think Dylan would be (perhaps ironically) the Newton in this analogy. (or maybe General Magic?) Pioneering and ahead of its time in many ways, but for whatever reason it seems that the use of multiple dispatch in Dylan seems to have not (
123.
by cbkeller 6y ago
In this context, I think there might be an argument to be made that Julia is to multiple dispatch (or multiple dispatch + JAOT) as the iPhone is to “touchscreen computers that can make phone calls”. It’s not that it’s the first, but it seem
124.
by cbkeller 6y ago
Currently you can make a relocatable “bundle” / “app” with PackageCompiler.jl, but the bundle itself includes a Julia runtime. Making a nice small static binary is technically possible using an approach similar to what GPUCompiler.jl d
125.
by cbkeller 6y ago
See also Lyndon’s blog post [1] about what all has changed since 1.0, for anyone who’s been away for a while. [1] https://www.oxinabox.net/2021/02/13/Julia-1.6-what-has-chang...
126.
by cbkeller 6y ago
Parallel precompilation! See also: https://www.oxinabox.net/2021/02/13/Julia-1.6-what-has-chang...
127.
by cbkeller 6y ago
Potentially yes: the supernodes were just other "regular users who had sufficient bandwidth" which could be quite efficient if you were all in, say a remote region with good local bandwidth but little connection back to the rest o
128.
by cbkeller 6y ago
On one hand you're absolutely correct in that Julia is dispatch-oriented, and doesn't have ton in common with what is commonly considered OOP today. However, as far as I understand it there is also an argument to be made that mult
129.
by cbkeller 6y ago
I was annoyed by that at first, but eventually came to appreciate how Julia's semantics for when broadcasting is or is not required for operations on scalars, vectors, and matrices map to the underlying math. I.e., for an N x N matrix
130.
by cbkeller 6y ago
Well that's probably at least in part because a major motivation for that acquisition was not to actually improve the underlying technology. To quote verbatim one of my favorite hn posts of all time ( https://news.ycombinator
131.
by cbkeller 6y ago
They do what they can, including things like [1] recently discussed here, but they're not exactly a Fortune-500 company yet. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26425659
132.
by cbkeller 6y ago
I think people often underestimate (or just plain don't know about) the degree to which a multiple-dispatch-based programming language like Julia effectively implies its whole own dispatch-oriented programming paradigm, with both some
133.
by cbkeller 6y ago
Little-known fact: there is a Julia interpreter, if anyone really wants to go that way: https://github.com/JuliaDebug/JuliaInterpreter.jl
134.
by cbkeller 6y ago
I think it really depends on what subset of data science you have in mind. For me it solved my personal version of the "two-language" problem, but YMMV. Longer-term I think the most interesting thing about the Julia ecosystem is t
135.
by cbkeller 6y ago
I don't mind Julia's Unicode support, but definitely share the gripe about how the Unicode standard doesn't yet support a complete a-z set of sub/superscripts!
136.
by cbkeller 6y ago
While normal Julia syntax is indeed arguably not quite homoiconic in the same way that Lisp s-expressions are (a good discussion of the issue by Stefan Karpinski here: [1]), it turns out there is a little-known built-in s-expression sy
137.
by cbkeller 6y ago
Adding Plots (or for that matter, Pluto!) to your sysimg with PackageCompiler.jl is a potentially significant QoL improvement on that front. Parallel auto-precompile in 1.6 is also awesome.
138.
by cbkeller 6y ago
Can you give a code example in R of what you would like to do in Julia? There are quite a lot of different ways of mapping in Julia, including functions like `map`, `mapreduce`, `replace`, and various syntaxes for broadcasting and array com
139.
by cbkeller 6y ago
Well, I'd say I'm generally at the shallow end of the HPC pool, and also in a field that's relatively new to HPC in general so there aren't a ton of established community codes to draw upon. Consequently, I'm willin
140.
by cbkeller 6y ago
C++ certainly, and I would not be surprised to see Rust in the near future. I have not seen anyone use Nim or Zig yet. There are also some special-purpose languages like Fortress (apparently now defunct), Coarray-Fortran, and Chapel, though
141.
by cbkeller 6y ago
Well Fortran was, notably, one of the first languages to have proper source-to-source autodiff (TAPENADE) [1-3], so it’s probably not impossible, though my choice for a fully differentiable climate model would personally be Julia, like the
142.
by cbkeller 6y ago
You can actually switch starting indices fairly easily in Fortran [1], or for that matter Julia, but for some reason the option doesn’t seem to be particularly widely used. People seem to give a lot of weight to the default, even when the e
143.
by cbkeller 6y ago
That is a great question, and while I don’t know for sure, I think a relevant anecdotal observation that stands out to me is that many languages which do have first-class multidimensional arrays also have one-based indexing. And I would s
144.
by cbkeller 6y ago
Switching to any sort of commercial grid or cloud computing setup would be rather complicated by the fact that climate models are critically dependent on the fast, low-latency interconnects (e.g., infiniband) of a proper HPC system to achie
145.
by cbkeller 6y ago
I really like both the Julia and R communities, so always glad to see good interoperability between them!
146.
by cbkeller 6y ago
High performance scientific computing is very much still a FORTRAN, C, and C++ game. And of those, FORTRAN has some compelling advantages in terms of first-class built-in support for multidimensional arrays, and quite excellent compilers. A
147.
by cbkeller 6y ago
In that case, go for it ;)
148.
by cbkeller 6y ago
Quite true! I thought about saying “kg of positrons and kg of electrons” or such so that the mass/charge ratio would be more equivalent.
149.
by cbkeller 6y ago
Not exactly: if you had a kg of free protons and a kg of free electrons, the electromagnetic forces between them would dwarf the gravitational forces between them even at macroscopic distances. By a lot , as Feynman liked to note in his Le
150.
by cbkeller 6y ago
Arguably it may also be because without JAOT compilation as in Julia, multiple dispatch normally comes with a significant runtime performance cost, as far as I understand.

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