Re:Pythran: Crossing the Python Frontier [pdf]
by joshuamorton on Tuesday April 24, 2018 @02:47PM
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Cool! To be clear, I realize that could have come across as an accusatory "prove it!", it wasn't meant that way. I've just never really needed anything not available in the scipy ecosystem, except for some obscure statistical methods (or not that obscure, but with a non-terrible api) that I don't think are available in julia either.
Re:Pythran: Crossing the Python Frontier [pdf]
by ChrisRackauckas on Tuesday April 24, 2018 @03:13PM
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You'd have to go to R for those esoteric stats packages :). Yeah, I think that what's available in each of the languages is kind of unknown until people need it. It would be hard to catalog it all too in a way that's both accessible and comprehensive.
I agree that Python has a library advantage in data science + ML. R has a library advantage in the area of statistics. But Julia has quite a few advantages in the core math areas of scientific computing and algorithm development. There is headway being made into DS+ML as well. Julia's pandas/dataframe equivalent is JuliaDB which adds out-of-core and online stats functionality, so it's more at the level of pandas+dask. Flux.jl is still in its early stages but it's quite a unique ML framework which can directly incorporate any Julia function at any level, and then has some working experiments with compiling to things like JS and XLA.
But in the broad view of things, every language has SciPy+NumPy pretty satisfactory (ex: Julia's Base library has most of it, the top 20 packages cover the rest), but from there all have tradeoffs in what areas the community is specializing in.