On Sat, 27 Feb 2021 at 13:03, Oscar Benjamin <oscar.j.benja...@gmail.com> wrote:
> More recently I've been exploring Julia. You could compare these pages:
>
> https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/interpreter.html#invoking-the-interpreter
> https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/getting-started/
>
> When installing julia you select the installer for your OS and there
> are some instructions for setting up PATH (although I didn't need to
> do that manually on OSX). After setup the instruction is that you type
> "julia" in the terminal and then Ctrl-D to exit. There are no caveats
> or mentions of different operating systems or words like "if" and
> "usually". The setup process is platform specific but then the usage
> instructions are not.
Sorry, I couldn't resist replying to this.
I went to the Julia page. That linked me to the download page. Which
offered me multiple versions. Which should I take? Stable, LTS or
"upcoming"? As a beginner without the experience I have hitting stuff
like this, how would I know? Let's assume "stable". OK, download and
run an installer is easy enough for me on Windows, but let's say I'm
doing this on Linux, I get the choice of "Generic Linux on x86" or
"Generic Linux on ARM". Huh? I'm on Ubuntu, not "Generic", so I'm
confused. Then I have "64-bit (GPG)" or "64-bit (musl) (GPG)" Or AArch
if I chose "ARM". How the heck would I know. Any of those get me a
.tar.gz file, which I don't know how to use...
Going to the Linux help, I get told to use wget, not the file I just
downloaded. And then I unpack it, and now I'm into setting PATH to
/tmp/julia-something/bin (because I did this in /tmp, as I have no
idea where I want to put this long term).
OK, my linux thought experiment isn't going well. Let's go back to
Windows, where I was lucky enough to pick "installer" rather than
"portable", so I avoided a world of pain about where to put the
package, just like I hit on Linux. The installer puts Julia in my
personal apps directory, just like Python does. I'm going to do
something "advanced" here ;-) and deselect "desktop shortcut" because
I hate clutter on my desktop. OK, it's complete, let's select "run
julia". That got me a prompt. Cool. Start menu item does the same.
Also cool.
BUT... The python installer on windows is *exactly the same*. Installs
to user's area, start menu entry that runs the REPL. So that's no
worse.
Suppose I go to a command prompt on my own and try to run Julia. Open
a terminal, "julia". No good, I need to set PATH. Hmm, wasn't there
something in the help on the Julia website about that? Off we go to
check. Weren't we here before when we were using Python? And the
instructions on the Julia website are about as complex as I'd expect,
and much the same as for Python. So still no worse for Python. But the
Python installer has "add Python to PATH" that does this stuff for you
(not selected by default, because of reasons that you may or may not
agree with, but at least it's *there*). And there's the py launcher,
but let's ignore that, as it works round some complexity at the cost
of some different complexity, so it's a distraction at this stage.
Honestly, I think Julia is overall slightly *worse* than Python (at
least on Windows). But it's almost identical in practice.
The one thing that *is* substantially worse for Python, is the
circumlocutions needed in the documentation to say how to run Python.
But that's 100% down to us not being willing to say "just type the
command python". And the reason for *that* is mostly historical,
related to the Python 3 transition and what happened on Linux over the
python/python2/python3 commands, and to a lesser extent the
introduction of the launcher on Windows ("lesser", because using the
launcher on the command line wasn't recommended until some time after
its introduction, at which point the python2/python3 split was
established)...
Paul
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