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Comment by makmanalp | Hacker News Reader

I like to say that Matlab was designed by applied mathematicians who don't want to care about software engineering, and python+numpy+scipy was designed by software engineers who don't want to care about applied mathematics :P

I don't know that that's strictly true but it gives you a general idea for why things are the way they are.

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Somehow it's nice to have a global namespace so I dont have to remember which libs have "plot()" or "sind()".

Nothing beats Matlab/Gnu Octave for me when I just want to make some quick calculations.

Julia "default" behavior (the 'using' keyword) is also importing everything (that is exported on the selected module) to the global namespace, using multiple dispatch to safely assign the optimal implementation of each function for each argument set without clashing. It's not unusual in Julia to have one function with more than a hundred implementations, and the user doesn't need to care which one will be chosen.

Though you can also use 'import' to keep the namespaces separate.

It's not really a default though. You have to always choose to do `using` instead of `import`. A lot of people choose `using`, because it's generally more safe than something like MATLAB or Python because of multiple dispatch, but there's nothing in the language that actually defaults to `using` other than the convention of some people.

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