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Comment by ones_and_zeros | Hacker News Reader

Any thoughts on how it compares and will overcome the dominant enviromnent for technical programming, matlab?

What Julia really lacks at this moment is something along the lines of the Matlab IDE. The community is aware of this though and there is something in the works that even I, someone that lives happily with a ssh/tmux/vim set-up, would deem as interesting.

Since we are on Hacker News, maybe I should also spread a rumour. MathWorks, allegedly, in a recent settled lawsuit added a condition stating that the other company was not to create any Julia bindings for its product. If this is true, which I have many reasons to believe, it is a major recognition of how at least MathWorks sees Julia as a real threat to the Matlab market share.

> MathWorks sees Julia as a real threat to the Matlab market share

I think Mathworks is feeling a lot of pressure from both Python & Julia. In the r2016a release of MATLAB, Mathworks essentially released a Jupyter (one of the first environments for Julia, and formerly iPython Notebooks) competitor with the 'Live Notebook'. Mathematica has had notebooks for quite a while, and the best Mathworks had was their MuPad suite. I think the prevalence of Jupyter definitely led to this development.

http://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab/live-editor/

On the other side of things, are you aware of any efforts in the open source community to close the gap between jupyter and Mathematica notebooks (i.e. editing of pretty-printed math expressions)?

I would really like to not give Stephen Wolfram money every year, but evidently not quite as much as I really like to be free of paragraph-form monospace code blobs from hell. I was hoping that MathJax meant I could wait a few years and have my cake and eat it too, but so far I haven't seen anything that looks serious :(

LyX and TeXMacs can do that kind of thing through Maxima plugins. The Maxima frontend itself has some prettifying capabilities. Of course, if you aren't doing symbolic math that is going to be less useful to you.

- http://www.texmacs.org/ - http://www.lyx.org/ - http://maxima.sourceforge.net/

> Mathematica has had notebooks for quite a while

Since 1988, I believe.

Certainly using Julia with Jupyter gets you much closer to having a reasonable IDE, though you'll have to be comfortable with cell-mode debugging instead of breakpoints and single stepping. I don't personally use it but I'm intrigued and would love to switch away from Matlab if there were reasonable feature parity or an alternate model that seemed reasonable for most basic tasks.

I'd really like to have a replacement for cell arrays and struct arrays, that have some of the convenient features of those structures. I know you can get this with lists of dictionaries in python, for example, but it's not the same.

There's now a true debugger: https://github.com/Keno/Gallium.jl Only works on master 0.5-dev right now, but it's coming along nicely.

Have you tried dataframes? Whether in Julia or Python, they're a good replacement for arrays-of-structs, though they need a lot of getting used to.

I've played around with them a little, but part of my issue is that our real-time data acquisition (in a neurophysiology lab) uses matlab/simulink so I'd need to create some middleware serializer to go from matlab data structures into dataframes. Not too difficult but there's a lot of momentum behind the matlab tooling unfortunately.

Try numpy record arrays

It's certainly faster: http://julialang.org/benchmarks/.

It is free/open source. And, it benefits from being a younger language and therefore has the hindsight of the quirks in Matlab's design. Coming from Python, the 1-indexed arrays are annoying but it's great for math.

The 1-indexed arrays can sometimes be nice, but I've run into bugs so many times when translating the code into a language with 0-indexed arrays.

That's interesting, because the 1-indexed arrays are primary the primary reason I don't ever seriously consider using Julia (or Lua); I can only shudder and imagine the obnoxious number of off-by-one mistakes I'd make.

If I can switch between programming languages that use 0-based and 1-based indexing without getting confused, surely you could too. If you don't think that learning to use 1-based indexing is worth it, that's fair enough, but it's pretty low on my list of things that give me trouble when I translate code between languages.

I think this is a mental block people have. I grew up on zero based arrays in C, but I can't say this has caused me any issues thus far using Julia.

I don't know how it is for others but for me I just into this mode where I think about Julia as doing math and I know in math you start at 1 for vectors and matrices.

Besides the way functions and APIs work, you seldom have to write code that really depends on the start index.

What you are saying is conjecture if you haven't tried Julia or Lua. The reality is that 1 based indexing is trivial compared to the difficulties of a complex program.

On the other hand having cut my teeth programming in MATLAB and lua 1-based indexing is on of the things that endears Julia to me.

Yeah, it just feels wrong. Of course that's just habit and in fact starting counts at 1 is actually the more user-centric way of doing it.

I wish I could get used to Julia but for some reason I just think the source looks..ugly. Maybe it's my dark past with php that makes me shudder at the sight of avg(x) (instead of x.avg).

I know that's stupid (and the syntax is actually required for multiple dispatch). Maybe Julia and I should try couples' therapy.

Basically every mathematical/data science language uses 1-based arrays -- R, MATLAB, and Mathematica in addition to Julia. Probably because traditionally (and to a degree even now) the standard numerical language was FORTRAN.

Out of curiosity, assuming that Julia magically had 0-indexed arrays, what would you use it for?

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