Comment by mdcfrancis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdcfrancis | Hacker News Reader

This is great news for Julia.

As a person who has spent the best part of year coding almost exclusively in Julia (I work in finance, we were one of the main sponsors of JuliaCon, though these are my personal thoughts) I want to chime in a little.

To get to 1.0 many of the cons in the language will be solved and there are plans in place for much of this.

I never cease to be surprised by the brevity of code to solve complex problems. Something which would be hundreds of lines in Java/C++ often turns into 50 or so lines of much more readable code.

When asked to describe Julia I struggle but end up this way 'I can make Julia 'dance' like no other fast programming language' though to be fair modern JS is pretty close for many tasks.

The parametric type system is to me the strongest part of the system - I describe it simply as 'templates that work', it is ridiculously powerful and (to me) is the most compelling reason to learn Julia.

I personally find even at 0.4 it is very usable even for tasks which are not math. Though the run time is currently fairly heavy.

So congrats to the Julia team.

"many of the cons in the language will be solved"

Can you elaborate on this?

Re type system, how does it compare to python in use?

I'm not the best placed person to answer about Python, my background is primarily C++/Java and functional languages. The types in general get out of the way. The ability to specialize behavior by types makes for some very interesting patterns and for a module writer add a huge amount of power. For the user of the module they rarely see the types.

The cons, top three from the top of my head, implicit array concat ( going in 0.5 ), String types ( going soon ), anonymous function performance ( gone by 1.0 )

None of these are show stoppers, but they do sometimes fall into the category of surprising. The core dev are very aware of the issues and if you look at the road map for 1.0 many are either well on their way to being fixed or are scheduled to be resolved.

As someone who spent some time learning Julia and wants to like it, here are the problems I experienced when I was trying to actually write software with it that I would keep using, as opposed to just scripting some numeric operation I needed to do.

* Non-numeric things are not well optimized. Building a dictionary full of strings was slower than Python when I tried it.

* The module system is confusing because of the principle that files should be "mostly unrelated" to modules. The documentation gives you no advice on how you should organize your code so that it's easy to import, understand, and maintain. The advice I got at a meetup was "just include() everything".

* Package management is a loose wrapper around git. The git commands it runs do not always succeed.

* Curly braces do something different in every version.

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