JuliaLang: The Ingredients for a Composable Programming Language

Re:JuliaLang: The Ingredients for a Composable Programming L... by smabie on Monday February 10, 2020 @12:19PM (#22291045)

Trashing is a little harsh, but Julia devs probably were mostly Python devs back in the day and are intimately familiar with the inadequacies of the language: the work required when you had to drop into C, the bad syntax for math, the constant conversions between ndarray, array, and lists, etc etc.

At my old bioinformatics lab, Python literally wasted thousands and thousands of collective man-hours which would have been saved by Julia if it had existed at the time. Since a lot of these researchers couldn’t really program that well, they would write code that would literally take weeks to run. And then they would call me and I would rewrite it in C and it would then take an hour or two. Julia solves this problem.

The amount of unnecessary supercomputer time (and electricity) that our lab (and others) were wasting with Python was, honestly, disgusting.

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Re:JuliaLang: The Ingredients for a Composable Programming L... by elcritch on Monday February 10, 2020 @02:43PM (#22292467)

Exactly... well I didn’t do supercomputing but still wasted a lot of time dealing with Python 2/3 issues among others. Then there’s the ability to do things like fast bootstrapping, Monte-Carlo and other handy statistical techniques without writing kernel functions in C. Python was great for it’s time and enabled a lot and still let’s lots of people do great things, it’s just not for me anymore.

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