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Comment by tobias2014 | Hacker News Reader

tobias2014

I fully agree. I work half of the time with Mathematica, the other half writing Fortran. Now you can guess what my job is ;). There is just no general purpose replacement for Mathematica. The language (everything is an expression) is beautiful and powerful. Whenever I tried something different I spent too much time looking for missing things or circumnavigating quirks and limitations. Other CAS are certainly useful when you can live with their limitations. Second place for me goes to Matlab, which occasionally performs certain tasks better (faster), but I don't like the language very much.

I can't say anything about Matlab, which seems to be fully focused on engineering applications.

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Did you mean something besides "Matlab" in one of these instances?

"Second place for me goes to Matlab... I can't say anything about Matlab..."

>Mathematica, Fortran

Fellow theoretical physicist?

What else, am I right?

Heh ... back when I was still in pursuit of the elusive academic career, I used MuMath, Maple, and Macsyma along with Fortran, C, and this odd language called Perl (to automate many of my jobs). Mathematica was still new-ish, and mostly confined to Macs.

These days, post physics, I do most of my work in Perl, Python, Julia, and various DBs, with lots of spreadsheets and slide decks.

I have Maxima (GPLed Macsyma) on my laptop now. I love that the fortran(); bit still works ...

(%i1) integrate(sin(x) * exp(-x) ,x,0,a); Is a positive, negative or zero?

positive;

                     - a
      1   %e    (cos(a) + sin(a))

(%o1) - - ------------------------------

      2              2

(%i2) fortran(%o1);

      1.0E+0/2.0E+0-(exp(-a)*(cos(a)+sin(a)))/2.0E+0

[updated to fix formatting issues]

I left academia before Julia became popular.

What's the deal with it, does it actually add anything over c/fortran + python?

It (often) performs much better than python/matlab without giving up the ease of use of those languages for numerical/scientific work.

Sounds reasonable, but am I missing something deeply important, like say lisp or haskell, if I don't learn Julia. What I've seen it's a nicer fortrant.

Julia is actually a pretty interesting language under the hood that is doing a lot of powerful things with metaprogramming and lisp-style macros. It also has a solid (optional) type system and method dispatching making a lot of things very clean.

That being said Julia has also done very good job of making it easy to use as just matlab 'clone' if that is what you want.

edit: I should add that as much as I admire Julia and enjoy playing around with it. 99% of my numeric work is still done with numpy and a smattering of C due to libraries/existing code/inertia

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