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Comment by real_eng_ | Hacker News Reader

Why every Julia user can't help but trash Python at every occasion?

It's getting really tiring

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.

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.

I haven't seen that at all - many Julia programmers are (or were) also Python programmers. I think there is a lot of respect in the Julia community for Python & the Python ecosystem. There have even been a number of Julia talks at various PyCons over the past few years.

There was a python talk at the 2019 juliacon.

This post doesn't even mention python. Not even once.

Hrm ... I recall Pythonistas trashing Perl as line noise, and other languages as well, for many many years. I'm not saying its right, just that karma, sometimes, comes back into focus.

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