My story is similar. I have no reservations recommending Julia to colleagues what-so-ever.
I write optimization software for a living, and I've used the basic parts of Matlab or Python + addons in past, but always got so annoyed that I switched back and forth between them for different projects. With Julia I finally found something that I really like. I can structure my Julia prototype in a way that's easily portable to C later on, and it's a bliss to write larger projects. I've written Julia prototypes for a complete conic interior-point optimizer, a graph partition algorithm for reordering large sparse matrices, and a toolbox for polynomial optimization using semidefinite programming, and the code is nice and clean and scales well. I could not have done that with either Matlab or Python. Things have broken for me in Julia when I upgrade, but I've always been able to update my projects in a couple of hours (after line-number reporting in error messages has become sensible). Den fredag den 6. marts 2015 kl. 09.42.29 UTC+1 skrev Daniel Carrera: > > On Thursday, 5 March 2015 18:49:24 UTC+1, Stefan Karpinski wrote: >> >> It's the people who are desperately unhappy with what they currently use >> that might really benefit – and those people do exist. >> > > *raises his hand* > > That is exactly me. For years I have wanted a language for scientific > computing with a nice syntax, nice API, and open source. I never managed to > like Python + NumPy. I was using Octave, and I was on the mailing list > asking if they'd consider making a few more improvements on the Matlab > syntax when someone said "have a look at Julia, it has the things you are > asking for". That was about a year after the official release of Julia (I > think). > > > >> but you'll have to deal with sometimes implementing things that other >> language already have packages for and with packages sometimes breaking >> when you upgrade them (the secret is don't upgrade often). >> > > Yeah. When my last paper was getting ready to be submitted I upgraded > *nothing*, even though a new and faster version of Julia had just come out. > I could not take the risk of some of my scripts breaking at the last minute. > > > >> As long as that tradeoff is clear, I think it's ok to recommend Julia, >> but one does have to set expectations honestly and not oversell it. >> > > Yeah. A couple of people have asked me about Julia and I tell them > something similar to what you just wrote. > > Cheers, > Daniel. > >
