General purpose always wins. Or should always win. Because in reality nobody has any idea what "the purpose" is in the grand scheme of things.
Python succeeded because it was general-purpose enough. Javascript too. We don't want more narrow purpose languages that force us to change the language every time we change the fragment of the stack we work on.
We need an ultra-general purpose language with good support for both OOP and FP, non-retarded type-system, decent performance, and a good "compile to readable JS" story... to unify this damn mess of "diversity" that forces us to over-specialize in narrow niches and drowns us in complexity.
(No, otoh, I don't think "general purpose" should mean "infinite power" or "maximum expressivity". There's are reason why we're not all using Common Lisp and Scala...)
Edit: Plus, you can pass your data structures out to Python or C for processing. And you can use a whole host of visualization tools.
I just dont see people with "software engineering" background taking any serious liking to it. So it creates DIVIDE between the "software engineering folks" (that want regular-looking-OOP-and-basic-FP architecting feature for APIs and stuff) and "data science folks" who just want to focus on the algorithms.
The litmus test for a "truly general purpose language" to me would be:
(1) write some algorithmic code in it (with not much concurrency and parallelism)
(2) write some (purposefully heavily overengineered) GUI or web-app (full-stack) code in it in a team of 3+ including at least one guy who's both really junior and another guy who's really sloppy
(3) write something making heavy use of networking, concurrency and parallelism
If all three feel EQUALLY natural in a language, than you've got a truly general purpose language. If not, look for something else.
And I know, people hate general purpose solutions just as much as they hate "expert generalist" people, and they have good reasons too, as we've all (or most) been burnt bad by contact with both such "solutions" and with such self-labeled people in the past. But just because we generally suck at "general purpose" doesn't mean we should stop trying!
> I just dont see people with "software engineering" background taking any serious liking to it.
I guess my point is that if you found Python general purpose enough, you'd likely find Julia general purpose enough too. If people with "software engineering background" take a serious liking to Python but not to Julia, then the reason probably isn't the language itself, but a combination of lack of popularity and a pre-conceived notion that the language is meant to be "scientific" not "general-purpose", that there aren't enough libraries, that the language might not survive, etc.
But it doesn't have to be that way. SQL is a domain specific language. Regex is a domain specific language. They take different API strategies: one goes for ubiquitous and standardized interfaces, the other goes for direct embedding. But they both prove that it's not necessary to write everything in a general purpose language.
There's nothing wrong with designing a language that is particularly good at data analysis, and which emphasises those features at the expense of others.
Swift is a general-purpose language, but I would say that its first purpose is for mobile development. (Or, at least, that's where it started.)
> Why would you use Swift as your new data science language when Julia was made for that purpose and Swift was not?
The author calls out Swift as being good because (1) TensorFlow is now supported for it specifically and (2) it is optimized for mobile development. The author seems to feel that being able to deploy machine learning applications to mobile devices (and optimized) is a great boon, and Python is not well-suited to this.
Anyway, it's not hard to get used to.
And honestly, it's because I do numerical programming that I value zero-based offsets. In addition to subscripting arrays (which I could do in any base), I use those subscripts in the math itself. For instance, the zeroth bin of an FFT indicates the zero frequency. I also choose the zeroth array element to represent the constant term (zeroth power) of a polynomial, and so on.
The common places where math notation uses 1-based subscripts (matrix notation) have more to do with people saying "first", "second", etc... With a few exceptions (the Hilbert matrix comes to mind), the base of the subscript isn't actually relevant to the math itself.
I do appreciate that zero is easier because of offset caluculations, but you really do get used to it and in most cases the compiler figures it out with almost no penalty.
What formulas do you regularly use which benefit from being 1-based? Note, I'm not asking for instances where the index doesn't really matter and the author of a paper simply chose base-1.
There are clearly cases where zero based is more natural. But I don't regularly use any cases where one based is an improvement.
I will admit that zero-based adds a lot of confusion when communicating to other people.
Funny how I always thought zero-based numbering[0] was a hack. Just in computer science a hack will become the right way? Any other fields where hacks became the new norm due to technical restrictions?
Your statement is a opinion.
To add to the list of languages using arrays in a "gross" way: pgsql, pascal, lua.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-based_numbering#Origin
Because of this, I figure any language that supports 1-indexing should also support arbitrary ranges for the indexing, like in Ada. (Basically, what's so special about 1?)
At age 0, you have no elements in your array of years. So the first year is also element 1.
If you want code to reflect the way you've done counting and arithmetic your whole life, you'd want it to start at 1.
Which to me is one step away from using the timepoint as the index iteself (zero as start), verus (1 year from zero).
How would you index the time before the first birthday?
Yeah, that's why put a smiley there. :-)
$[ = 1;
$| = 1;Personally, I’m not aware of the ability to write mobile apps in Julia.
If I’m wrong, please post links, as that would certainly open up the conversation.