Re:Why I am betting on Julia (2014)
by sklogic on Monday April 18, 2016 @04:33AM
(#11518465)
They tried to use Julia for things like networking instead of confining it within purely numeric parts. No idea why would anyone use a DSL for doing some "general purpose" stuff.
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I've used Matlab quite a lot for "general purpose" stuff. Ok not networking, but you'd be surprised how good it can be at non-numeric things.
Most of that was probably due to the slick GUI which nothing else comes close to (I've tried them all; trust me), but that is a legitimate factor.
Of course it can be used for a general purpose stuff, but it should not, because there are always much better tools that a specialised for those domains. It's never a good idea to use a language for something it was not designed for.
Technically Julia is designed for general purpose computing. It just happens to be really good at numerical applications. The main thing holding it back is lack of tooling, debugging, and somewhat largish changes in syntax still. Having said that writing typed, expressive, and _performant_ DSL's in Julia is easy if not even kinda fun.