Re:Why I'm Betting On Julia
by lloda on Friday January 24, 2014 @04:09AM
(#7114017)
Sometimes an array of numbers is just an array of numbers. The language shouldn't presume too much about what you mean to do with them.
The moment you need an extra dimension (or anything other than 2 really) Matlab's ‘everything is a matrix’ approach falls apart. Matlab is a toy language in so many ways and this is just another one.
It's a pity that Julia adopted Matlab's pop matrix semantics instead of some solid and general principles from APL or J. Even modern Fortran would have been a better model for an array DSL. From what I've read of the Julia docs, they actually want you to write loops. But Julia looks great otherwise. With macros and a good compiler, maybe the array features can be fixed at some point.
The moment you need an extra dimension (or anything other than 2 really) Matlab's ‘everything is a matrix’ approach falls apart. Matlab is a toy language in so many ways and this is just another one.
It's a pity that Julia adopted Matlab's pop matrix semantics instead of some solid and general principles from APL or J. Even modern Fortran would have been a better model for an array DSL. From what I've read of the Julia docs, they actually want you to write loops. But Julia looks great otherwise. With macros and a good compiler, maybe the array features can be fixed at some point.