On Wednesday, 4 March 2015 14:19:39 UTC+1, Páll Haraldsson wrote: > > 2. A friend, a guy I consider a programmer wizard from my youth, MS in > engineering/PhD computer science, now working in systems biology and > teaches computer science classes in my university. > > Uses MATLAB (and C++ for performance) for his systems biology. Hates R.. > doesn't use. Uses Python when teaching (say general construction/object > oriented). > > > Says MATLAB is standard in the scientific world, what you use when > publishing articles.. Also isn't really too unsatisfied with the > performance most of the time. >
I think that this last comment is a gross oversimplification. In astronomy MATLAB is definitely not standard. Leaving aside the compiled languages (Fortran and C) the most common language in astronomy is definitely IDL. There is also a growing trend of people using Python, and I know that at least one team that uses Java. We use Matlab in some of our classes, and I teach a 3-day Matlab course for our students, but I don't know any astronomer who uses Matlab for real work (but I'm sure they exist). I use Julia for all my astronomy work except for the heavy-weight simulations that run in our computer cluster and are written in Fortran. I use Julia to process and analyze data from my simulations, and I use Julia whenever I have a new idea that I want to experiment with. > 3. A guy I met at work (do not know him), working in bioinformatics using > Python. Says he's a "late adopter of new languages". I said > "understandable.. I'm sure you would be pleasantly surprised, but I do not > really know about the available bioinformatics Julia package" (plural?) or > too much about your field. > Julia is definitely a young language, and I consider myself an early adopter. For example, for plotting I need to use Python's Matplotlib (via the PyPlot package) because the native Julia plotting packages are simply not mature enough. In general, my supervisor doesn't care what I use, but I need to be able to make every plot exactly the way he (or the journal) says. So I need a mature plotting library that I know can do anything. > I understand Perl is/was popular in bioinformatics as really it's kind of > string processing. Should Perl (or Python) be somehow superior to Julia for > it? > I used to be a big Perl enthusiast. Today Julia has replaced Perl as my default "go-to" language for regular daily work. I hardly use Perl anymore. When I need to make a quick script to grab stuff from a text file I usually write a shell script with grep, sed and awk. So in a sense Julia has not exactly replaced Perl for everything. But nowadays it is rare that I write a Perl script. I think I've written one this year. I had to parse a text file that was easy to parse with Perl but less trivial with either Julia or grep/sed/awk. Julia is a general purpose language, but that doesn't mean that it has to be the best language at everything. My view is that Julia is specialized for scientific computing but is generic enough to be suitable for regular every-day tasks. Cheers, Daniel.
