Julia tries, and I think succeeds, in solving the two language problem. The two language problem being that one uses one language for most things but drops down to a fast language for bottlenecks and/or one language to prototype one for production.
This means that Julia has to cater to a wide range of programming style and tastes: ranging from a throw-away script to big application code. To pick up the not-integer-indexing example: this is probably in the "throw-away-script" category. It seems it has been deemed too much so, thus support was removed. In my big-application-code, I'd certainly want not-integer-indexing to error. Note that this goes the other way too: people hoping for a more strict approach, presumably to make big-application-code more maintainable (see e.g. this thread discussing private-functions of modules: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/julia-users/by3y9JEMra8/9xqvoy_xd6YJ) I think, the devs have found good middle ground in their design of Julia so far. As Julia is evolving, discussions on these topics are important (although not at infinitum...). Mauro On Tue, 2015-11-17 at 12:14, Christoph Ortner <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Peter, > > I've had multiple discussions along similar lines over the past year, since > I started coding in Julia. I think I lost every single argument. > Personally, I think you are right and I think this is an important issue. > However, Julia is open source, so the decisions are made by those who > develop the language. They are naturally strong computer scientists and > have different priorities from us. > > I'd love to contribute to developing Julia, but I simply don't have the > time for it. It is just a question of priority: (1) I care enough to make > that time - at considerable expense to my research and family life; (2) I > just go with the flow and adapt. (3) I sigh wistfully and go back to Matlab > which it seems might start catching up again on performance. > > For now, I've gone with (2), but a lot will depend on how the language > continues to develop. I agree with your sentiment that >> Indeed, sometimes I feel as if I might as well be coding in C. > Only *sometimes*, however, these sometimes can get very frustrating. > > All the best, > Christoph
