Isaiah
Thanks for your great response  and the suggestion that I contribute.  I'll 
keep an eye out for something useful that I can do.
Chris

On Saturday, November 22, 2014 10:19:59 PM UTC-8, Isaiah wrote:
>
> Thanks for the comments. Many of these things are on the radar, and 
> contributions are very much welcome and encouraged. As is often the case in 
> open source projects at a relatively early stage, such issues are not 
> technically blocked so much as rate-limited by concerns like "graduation", 
> "tenure", and "sleep". So every little bit helps :) To address a couple 
> points:
>
> Compile time - yes, this is everyone's major peeve. there are several open 
> issues you can read on the julia github tracker. basically there are 
> parallel efforts (including improvements already on 0.4-dev and a number of 
> open PRs) - towards improved caching (general and module-level), and 
> towards compiler improvements (there is an issue called 'compiler 
> improvement tracker')
>
> Reloading - see https://github.com/malmaud/Autoreload.jl and 
> http://junolab.org/. the general plan is to make a Julia superbundle with 
> more of these nice things packaged together for one-click-install. 
> hopefully we will have that for the 0.4 release.
>
> * Is there anything like Matlab's 'format'?
>
> Not sure exactly, but probably @printf does something similar
>
> Line numbers - there are several open issues about this, and various pull 
> requests to both Julia and LLVM to improve the situation.
>
> I think there might be an open issue or even a PR about getting the 
> `str<ctrl-p>` behavior.
> Ctrl-p/n work to step through history, without typing ctrl-r
>  
>
> On Sat, Nov 22, 2014 at 10:24 PM, Christian Peel <[email protected] 
> <javascript:>> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I'm excited about Julia because of the speed and open nature of the 
>> language.  I have a couple of suggestions from the past couple of days of 
>> my time with the language:  (1) decrease the JIT time to allow faster code 
>> changes, (2) automatically detect changed files and reload them, again to 
>> allow developers to change their code quicker.    Combine that with the 
>> integrated debugger that I believe is coming soon, and I think Julia will 
>> be much more appealing.
>>
>> Here are some questions: 
>> * Have any plans been made on allowing Julia to automatically notice that 
>> a file has changed and reload it?  What is the normal development technique 
>> for Julia developers? I typically write some code, test it, write some 
>> more, and test it again.  For julia, do you just 'include' or 'reload' 
>> every time you change a file?
>> * It can take a long time (10 seconds on my 2013 Macbook Pro) to do the 
>> JIT (I guess that's what it's doing) the first time I run my simple 
>> 500-line toy script after loading it; Putting this in the middle of 
>> developing high-level code is really awkward.  Can you do anything to bring 
>> this down?
>> * Why can't Julia show line numbers every time an error occurs, rather 
>> than just sometimes?  Some errors for which I did not see line numbers 
>> include "ERROR: BoundsError()" and "ERROR: `*` has no method matching 
>> *(::Array{Complex{Float64},3}, ::Array{Float64,1})"
>> * I guess there is some sort of compilation happening when a file is 
>> 'included'; can we have that spit out errors, rather than waiting for the 
>> JIT to work?  The sooner we can see errors in my code, the better.  
>> * At the matlab prompt, I can type 'str" then ctrl-P and it finds the 
>> most recent command in the history that starts with 'str' and puts it on my 
>> command line.  I can then hit enter immediately and execute it.  It appears 
>> that with the current Julia setup, one has to type ctrl-R to enter 
>> (reverse-i-search), where you can type 'str' and then ctrl-P or ctrl-N to 
>> move forward and back through the history.  On finding an entry to execute, 
>> one has to type enter twice, once to exit the interactive search and once 
>> to execute the command.  Is it possible to configure Julia to have a 
>> matlab-style search always active?  I tried playing around with the "Custom 
>> Keybindings" description in the manual (http://bit.ly/1uOsoWq), but I 
>> didn't know what I was doing.
>> * Is there anything like Matlab's 'format'?   Something so I don't see so 
>> many significant digits when using print? 
>> * Why does string concatenation use the "*" operator and not "+"?    
>> (yes, this is completely minor, but I'm curious anyway... :-)
>> * I'd like to type "exit" instead of "exit()" or "edit myfile" instead of 
>> "edit("myfile")    I can likely get used to this, but right now I'm 
>> noticing those few extra characters that I'm typing  :-)      Could anyone 
>> explain the motivation for this choice?
>>  
>> This week I ported a 500-line Matlab script to Julia 0.3.2; these 
>> questions and comments  are the result. My main impression is that 
>> debugging is painful; to be useful as an every-day tool, the interaction 
>> with the REPL and the write code/debug iteration has got to improve.  
>>
>> My best
>>
>> Chris
>>
>
>

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