On Tuesday, September 29, 2015 at 10:20:18 AM UTC, Tomas Lycken wrote:
>
> One thing Python does well, which Julia doesn't (yet) succeed in, is make
> it easy to start coding from zero experience and get something that
> executes "well enough"
>
I think, this may be a little unfair to Julia. Python (and Perl) succeeded
not because it is fast (only because it has fast development times - to
begin with at least). Julia is expected to be fast, compared to C, Python
isn't. Even if Julia were as slow as Python, it seems to be a better
language - more maintainable, as more static and doesn't really have
duck-typing (and Hoare's "billion dollar mistake"), right?
(although, as always with first-time coders, code organization and
> readability might still leave some things to wish for...).
>
> In Julia, it's very much possible to get something to run, but the
> performance differences between well-written and not-so-well-written code
> are *huge*.
>
Right, but even your code that is written to be slow should work (no
segfaults..) and not be slower than Python? At least, those would be
exceptional cases, all that I would like to know about as I see no good
reason for it.
The way I see it, yes, type-instability makes your code way slower, but
isn't that (roughly) the same as in Python, where all code is
"type-unstable", because of duck-typing? That is or was at least the
default. Now PyPy and Numba etc. helps (that didn't exist in the
beginning/10 years ago)
This means that most users will show their code to someone who knows more
> than they do, and more likely than not get a first reaction along the lines
> of "everything you do is wrong". Although the statement isn't untrue, it's
> very off-putting - and even more off-putting is the fact that there's a lot
> of "computer sciencey" stuff you need to understand to be able to grasp
>
Only for fast code, not "correct" code. And 90% of code isn't
speed-critical. To a beginner this seems very good. First you learn the
basics. You can prototype and later optimize ("premature optimization is
the root of all evil"?).
*why* you did it wrong (type stability, difference between abstract and
> leaf types, difference between anonymous and named functions etc).
>
> Don't get me wrong - I think Julia is doing a lot of things right, and I'm
> glad that these "CS-y" questions are asked and handled up-front: this is
> what gives Julia much of its power. Hopefully, much of the performance
> difference between hacked-together-rubbish code and well-polished code will
> be eradicated by version 1.0, and we'll see how popular Julia becomes then.
>
> Currently, though, the success of any general programming language or tool
> seems to hinge mostly on what you can build with it (Objective C is ugly as
> hell
>
yes.. You can actually call Objective-C (OS X) from Julia.. I think Android
support should come first, then iOS support. Neither should be too hard,
possibly Apple would object..
--
Palli.
