Julia

[bchip]

Never heard of it, but interesting post

Why is everyone talking about Julia, the new programming language and why is it considered to be superior to the existing ones?

Erik Engheim's answer: Because Julia is a “have a cake and eat it too” kind of language. It does what was thought impossible: It is an expressive dynamic language which also happens to be really fast. Before Julia it was believed that a language had to be statically typed and cumbersome to use to...

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Why is everyone talking about Julia, the new programming language and why is it considered to be superior to the existing ones?

Because Julia is a “have a cake and eat it too” kind of language. It does what was thought impossible: It is an expressive dynamic language which also happens to be really fast. Before Julia it was believed that a language had to be statically typed and cumbersome to use to get high performance. Dynamic languages were believed to be inherently slow. Exemplified e.g. by all the resources poured into trying to get performance out of Python and Ruby.

Julia solves the two language problem: Scientific software would usually be developed in a dynamic language which gave the ability to experiment to get the right solution. This would be MATLAB, R and Python. However these languages would not offer enough performance, so the code would later be have to be rewritten in Fortran, C or C++.

Julia does away with this problem. There is no rewrite step needed. Julia also has a feature set which allows it to replace MATLAB, R and Python. That means Julia has the potential to replace 6 languages used within scientific computing. That is quite a feat.

Part of this is because Julia is more general purpose. That also means there is a lot of benefits to using Julia outside of the scientific field.

 

[cguy]

I’ve always liked the idea of Julia. If I had to use one language, I would want it to be Julia. For using packages, writing libraries and doing glue code, Python is better (but so much slower), and for large performance sensitive code bases, C/C++ is faster.

 

[bchip]

I’ve always liked the idea of Julia. If I had to use one language, I would want it to be Julia. For using packages, writing libraries and doing glue code, Python is better (but so much slower), and for large performance sensitive code bases, C/C++ is faster.

Interesting, thanks.
Will have a look into Julia then

 

[Hamster]

When I read "the new programming language Julia" in 2020. Nice to read about it again, completely forgot about it.

 

[cguy]

Interesting, thanks.
Will have a look into Julia then

It’s almost strictly better than R as a research platform - I wish some of the people at work would switch to it (vs R). The moment you need to do a for loop in R, you’re dead in the water (in terms of speed) - experienced R developers will be able to turn just about every for loop into a functional expression, which is good to a point, but for complex enough scenarios the code ends up just plain unreadable.

 

[Hamster]

Think I should go play with it again

println("What's your name?")
name = readline()
name = "@Thor" # nobody cares about your real name
println("Whatever\nSee $name, Julia is better than PHPiepie")

 

[Hamster]

Right, now I remember, you can't just use something like...

$ juliac main.jl

...to compile a standalone executable which takes away the "general porousness".

 

[cguy]

Right, now I remember, you can't just use something like...

$ juliac main.jl

...to compile a standalone executable which takes away the "general porousness".

Yeah, that’s one complaint. There’s also several issues where it becomes noninteractive because it stops to compile. Eg, drawing graphics, etc, which are immediate on Python and R.

 

[Magnum]

Nah...Assembler is still the fastest. Just a shame nobody can code in it anymore.

 

[Hamster]

Yeah, that’s one complaint. There’s also several issues where it becomes noninteractive because it stops to compile. Eg, drawing graphics, etc, which are immediate on Python and R.

A shame, but that's why I'd rather use languages that do support this: c# core*, go, rust, dart even Kotlin

There's no excuse really. It's "petty" but it's import to me especially in a recent language.

 

[cguy]

Nah...Assembler is still the fastest. Just a shame nobody can code in it anymore.

I can (and sometimes do)