On Thursday, March 5, 2015 at 2:52:06 PM UTC, Daniel Carrera wrote: > > > > On Wednesday, 4 March 2015 14:19:39 UTC+1, Páll Haraldsson wrote: >> >> 2. A friend, [..] 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. >
Sorry, yes. > In astronomy MATLAB is definitely not standard. > He's not doing astrobiology, it's more down to earth :) I was just repeating what he said, not because I believe it applies to the whole scientific world (he probably meant only in the systems biology field, if that); I thought (proprietary) MATLAB code shouldn't a requirement for any journal (publisher requirements, or familiarity for readers, besides Julia is close enough..). > Leaving aside the compiled languages (Fortran and C) the most common > language in astronomy is definitely IDL. > I haven't really looked much into IDL (and probably will not), still interesting that this language from 1977 is still in use. Since similar to MATLAB, I assume IDL also likely could get killed by Julia(?). Assume Julia could call IDL and back for old code, someone would just have to make it happen.. Like MATLAB it seems not as free (while more free, and both have free implementations): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDL_(programming_language) "IDL Save/Restore files embody unpublished proprietary information about the IDL program. Reverse engineering of this file is therefore forbidden under the terms of the IDL End User License Agreement (IDL EULA)." > 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. > I assume there is nothing wrong with that, while you could re-implement a lot of stuff, I see it as a plus for Julia how much has been reused with wrappers and how easy it is. 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. > I still use/d those little languages, (I see at least one Julia developer do too (along with Julia); in the Fortran transpiler.., stage 1). I guess there's nothing wrong with that, old habits die hard. I never graduated to Perl, and while am not too familiar with it I'm not sure if it's more natural for these things than Python and/or Julia. I suppose none of these are a perfect replacement for the dataflow idea of pipes (not that you can't use pipes with Julia). 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. > I still view the little languages, as little bit of an exception (as some are not Turing complete). It's not like Julia is exactly one language, it has regular expressions, so it's at least two (and supports many others, SQL, and DSLs). I want too look more into what DSLs have been added..
