I agree with many of the comments above. I recommend Julia only to a subset of my colleagues. From Matlab the barrier to entry is incredibly low and you gain on both speed and price, the only argument against is that Matlab users tend to have years of experience in their one language and not such a habit of learning new languages.
I personally moved from mainly GPGPU based programming using C; despite the difficulty of that field I found the move painful due to a lack of detailed documentation (my perception). Don't get me wrong, there's enough documentation out there to make a decent stab at getting things done. But I'm used to having a much more nuanced understanding of a language and the documentation doesn't yet go into this level of detail, nor are there sufficient examples out there. For my colleagues who are strong programmers (Python particularly), they refuse to touch the language until there's a debugger. At the very least they want to be able to set breakpoints and run to them. Personally, I'd also like a REPL command which prints out a list of all of the objects currently in memory space (like 'whos' in Octave). This seems like a basic requirement for REPL based numerical programming. Julia is elegant and growing strongly, but I'm still quite selective about who I proselytise to. I have the feeling that it will be so many times a more comfortable experience in 6-12 months time that I'd rather not colour people's early experiences in a negative light if better is soon to come. David. On Thursday, 5 March 2015 13:43:51 UTC+1, Christoph Ortner wrote: > > For this reason, while I am happy to talk about how nice Julia is, I >> will not try to convince people to switch to it. IMO the people who are >> potential switchers at this stage have already looked at Julia, and >> evangelizing more aggressively could be counterproductive at this stage. > > > I think this is really important. Personally, I am thrilled with Julia, > because I write code that does not need any packages other than plotting > and File I/O. But I really need the combination of rapid development > (scripting, dynamic) and then being able to optimise certain passages, > without ever having to switch to C. But I would never recommend Julia > (at this stage) to a "production user", only to people who might like to > "play with it". > > The main point I make to people is that the entry barrier from Matlab to > Julia is incredibly low. (Whereas from Matlab to Python it is huge.) The > only real hurdle for Matlab people, I think, is to get used to multiple > dispatch, that took me a while, but I am now in a constant state of bliss > :). > > So far, I've convinced my entire research group, three collaborators and a > friend's postdoc to try out Julia both for research and teaching, and the > response I got from everyone so far has been very positive. We are all > numerical analysts, or related disciplines, and for us it is just a > wonderful language. > > Christoph >
