Some Insights from a Julia Developer

Re:Some Insights from a Julia Developer by x0x0 on Saturday October 14, 2017 @07:34PM (#15474920)

I think your fears are misplaced.

R users love R because of ease of use. R does sometimes ignores ugly corner cases in favor of that ease of use (though I'm skeptical this damages the validity of the answer in anything like 5% of cases), but that's a side effect.

sklearn and pandas are great, but you still simply have to be a programmer to use them, or at least much closer to a programmer than many statisticians want to be. Allowing non-programmers to do things like

   data <- read.csv(file='blah.csv')
   fit1 <- lm(outcome ~ var1 + var2, data)

   anova(fit1)
   summary(fit1)

to read data, run a linear model, and get an anova and p-values is amazing, and massively widens the scope of people to whom these tools are available.

This omission of most quoting, the magic inference of column names, etc etc all makes R much easier to use.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Some Insights from a Julia Developer by ACow_Adonis on Saturday October 14, 2017 @08:33PM (#15475131)

In many ways, I think we're actually in agreement :p

Free. Quick. Interactive. 4 lines. Done. What's the value proposition of Julia compared to that? Now you can argue that Julia will allow better type specification and specialisation, etc, etc. But that's not what's valued or used in your example.

Now, my mindset/domain has to engage with such, and i freak out at the implicit-ness/assumptions inherent in such code, especially with some of R's additional design choices.

In my mind, having code that crashes/errors out when something ambiguous/dangerous is encountered in your example a "good thing". But that's not what's valued in the above example.

And while Julia would allow someone to program in such a way as to specialise or raise these errors and concerns, what is valued is the ability to not think about them. And if you don't think about them, or even as a library designer, if you want to program in such a way that your user primarily doesn't want to think about them, then you're effectively very close to reinventing/reimplementing a new "R", with all its costs and benefits.

I'm just making this observation explicit, even though I actually do value the things the Julia crowd seems to value, but I'm not sure I'm in the majority, and I'm not sure you can push that down into the libraries without exposing concerns most users don't want to be exposed to.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Some Insights from a Julia Developer by fspeech on Saturday October 14, 2017 @09:13PM (#15475299)

DWIM (Do What I Mean) at the UI level seems a good feature to aspire to. The sanity check could (and should) be done using an independent method (say manually check a couple of things, or is that too out-of-dated?).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Some Insights from a Julia Developer by dnautics on Saturday October 14, 2017 @11:11PM (#15475691)

julia code tends to be extremely terse. I had to listen to unix domain sockets and spit out an aggregated result to an upstream analytics engine and I accomplished the whole thing (including spawning worker threads to listen to potentially multiple clients posting to the domain sockets), in about 65 lines of code. It's also very readable. I don't have any uptime guarantees or anything (and it requires a fairly heavyweight julia container - or a julia runtime installation - atm), so I wouldn't say it's an optimal solution moving forward, but as a glue piece I was able to show a demo and get to the point where I was debugging upstream and downstream components.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Some Insights from a Julia Developer by x0x0 on Saturday October 14, 2017 @11:06PM (#15475676)

I don't think julia is going after R's niche. They're going after matlab and sklearn/pandas/numpy.

so my 02 on julia's value prop: free. performant. scalable. capable. easy to use is there, but the others matter a bit more.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Some Insights from a Julia Developer by dnautics on Saturday October 14, 2017 @11:06PM (#15475675)

hell, I'm a programmer (currently writing low-level i/o access to a linux block device) and I shudder when thinking of having to learn sklearn and pandas.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Some Insights from a Julia Developer by x0x0 on Saturday October 14, 2017 @11:07PM (#15475680)

They're great, really! I'm not a hater. It's just you have to be at least an ok programmer to use them, because (and I know this isn't a word) the programmery-ness of what you're doing just pokes through a lot.

[ Parent | on HN ]