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Re:Julia v1.3 by The_rationalist on Tuesday November 26, 2019 @06:05AM (#21637227)
Not being 100% interoperable with python make Julia doomed.

Library ecosystems have a human workforce value of billions of dollars, available for free. Any modern language that want to go mainstream must offer transparent and complete interoperability with an existing ecosystem. TypeScript -> js Kotlin -> jvm C++ -> C Elixir -> Erlang Hack -> php Crystal -> ruby

As we can see there are still Big ecosystems lacking a new modern language™ The python ecosystem The C# (CLR) ecosystem

It could be said that's mainly because those languages are already mostly "modern"

There are also dying big ecosystem and there would be economic value to make their old libraries accessible. Fortran Pascal Perl Etc

Re:Julia v1.3 by nnq on Tuesday November 26, 2019 @06:34AM (#21637388)
There are only 2 languages with really good Python interop (you could call it "as close as possible to 100%" since there is no such thing as "100% interop" except across languages sharing same VM like on the JVM Java & Clojure & Kotlin...).

One of them is Julia! - https://github.com/JuliaPy/PyCall.jl .

The other is Swift - https://github.com/tensorflow/swift/blob/master/docs/PythonI... .

Re:Julia v1.3 by oxinabox on Tuesday November 26, 2019 @07:52AM (#21637806)
And pretty sure the Swift team did it after seeing how well it went for julia.
Re:Julia v1.3 by socialdemocrat on Tuesday November 26, 2019 @06:34AM (#21637387)
You can use Python, C and Fortran code from Julia. More importantly package development is much faster in Julia than in Python. Which means the speed of which packages get added to Julia is much faster than Python.

And here is the kicker: Packages is Julia are far more interoperable than in any other eco system I have seen.

Than means 10 packages in Julia can quickly do more than 50 packages in other language. Say somebody makes a GPU processing package and somebody else makes a Machine learning package. They don't know about it each other.

Yet with Julia we frequently see that these guy can use each others package. The ML package can with little effort run on a GPU by including a GPU package even if it was never designed for it.

Julia just moves way faster than the competition and that is why Julia is NOT doomed.

Re:Julia v1.3 by coldtea on Tuesday November 26, 2019 @07:27AM (#21637660)
>You can use Python, C and Fortran code from Julia. More importantly package development is much faster in Julia than in Python. Which means the speed of which packages get added to Julia is much faster than Python.

That's because Python already has tons, while Julia lacks tons.

Are the new ones added to Julia as good or better though?

>That means 10 packages in Julia can quickly do more than 50 packages in other language. Say somebody makes a GPU processing package and somebody else makes a Machine learning package. They don't know about it each other. Yet with Julia we frequently see that these guy can use each others package. The ML package can with little effort run on a GPU by including a GPU package even if it was never designed for it.

This sounds like magic bullet / handwaving.

Perhaps Julia's multiple dispatch helps here (?), but why would the above be the case and wouldn't be achievable in other existing languages as is?

Re:Julia v1.3 by ChrisRackauckas on Tuesday November 26, 2019 @08:24AM (#21638035)
>This sounds like magic bullet / handwaving.

It's not handwaving when it already exists. CUDAnative.jl gives native compilation of Julia code to GPUs, which allows CuArrays.jl to do efficient loop fusion among other tricks. This is then enough for DifferentialEquations.jl, Flux.jl (the big neural net library, think PyTorch), CLIMA (a MIT-CalTech next-gen climate model), etc. (too many packages to list) to all utilize the same underlying GPU framework. It's as if someone got rid of the GPU functionality of Numba, PyTorch, TensorFlow, etc. and just made one good enough Python library for everyone to share. As you can imagine, that reduces the amount of work to do package development but gets the same functionality in the end with a lot less maintenance issues. You can also say the same for how many JITs and transpilers to C there are in Python libraries vs the single Julia JIT.

The real danger of the Python monoliths is that when something as simple as a neural network package starts to include a JIT, a GPU compiler, and automatic differentiation library, and it's all written in C++, it gets really hard to attract developers because the code base is so hard to understand. This means that instead of getting new developers and more maintenance, people just spawn new libraries all of the time in Python, starting from scratch to write a new JIT, new GPU kernels, etc. I just cannot see how that's a good thing.

Re:Julia v1.3 by StefanKarpinski on Tuesday November 26, 2019 @08:15AM (#21637971)
> Perhaps Julia's multiple dispatch helps here (?), but why would the above be the case and wouldn't be achievable in other existing languages as is?

Yes, ubiquitous, zero-overhead multiple dispatch is the reason, as explained in depth here:

https://youtu.be/kc9HwsxE1OY

Re:Julia v1.3 by coldtea on Wednesday November 27, 2019 @02:22PM (#21651050)
Thanks, checking!
Re:Julia v1.3 by outnmbout on Tuesday November 26, 2019 @10:11AM (#21638888)
>> Not being 100% interoperable with python make Julia doomed.

> Than means 10 packages in Julia can quickly do more than 50 packages in other language.

Maybe you guys would like to compare your text editors now?

Re:Julia v1.3 by Tomte on Tuesday November 26, 2019 @06:16AM (#21637298)
> As we can see there are still Big ecosystems lacking a new modern language™ [...] The C# (CLR) ecosystem

F#, obviously.

Re:Julia v1.3 by coldtea on Tuesday November 26, 2019 @07:29AM (#21637675)
Not to mention C# is as modern as it gets...
Re:Julia v1.3 by StefanKarpinski on Tuesday November 26, 2019 @08:20AM (#21638001)
Is it really? Class-based single dispatch OO with strictly explicit static typing—no gradual or optional or even Hindley-Milner type inference—is about as 90s a language design as there is. It’s like the “Friends” of PL designs. Which is to say, very popular and not bad, but certainly not modern or cutting edge.
Re:Julia v1.3 by coldtea on Wednesday November 27, 2019 @03:08AM (#21646130)
I didn't say "cutting edge" though, I said modern.

Modern is not some "PL-community favorite with small following" a la Haskell, it's what programmers in the trenches are using. The same way a modern car is (pick a popular current model) and not some limited edition car with limited sales.

C# "keeps up with the Joneses", brings in ideas from functional programming (bringing in F# features incrementally), etc.

LINQ, pattern matching, dynamic, value types, tuples, destructuring, async/await, null-coalescing operators/assignment, streams, and much more...

Not only is up there with any popular language in the same domain (Swift, Kotlin, etc), and way ahead of Java, but compared to something like Go that gets people excited this is space technology.

(Plus is not like multiple dispatch is a new development, or gradual/optional typing is the "new" thing - we had those things for decades, and I don't see them catching on except the latter where necessary - e.g. adding gradual typing in JS/Python/etc variants like TS, where they can't have strict static typing for compatibility/historical reasons. The only language with gradual typing I remember in recent times was not very cutting-edge itself, Dart, and didn't manage to go anywhere).

Re:Julia v1.3 by SigmundA on Tuesday November 26, 2019 @08:45AM (#21638175)
C# supports multi-dispatch and gradual typing using the dynamic keyword since 4.0. It also does some type inference using var, but not full HM.
Re:Julia v1.3 by BubRoss on Tuesday November 26, 2019 @08:46AM (#21638182)
How is C# modern? It is extremely verbose and rooted in Java style 'OO' with lots of memory hopping.
Re:Julia v1.3 by SigmundA on Tuesday November 26, 2019 @09:17AM (#21638430)
Every iteration of C# has made it less verbose and adds more modern concepts [1].

What do you mean by memory hopping, reference types? C# has had value types since the beginning unlike Java.

1. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/csh...

Re:Julia v1.3 by coldtea on Tuesday November 26, 2019 @12:51PM (#21640694)
Modern != less verbose