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Comment by dragonsh | Hacker News Reader

Good work and keep it up.

A nice language for scientific computing after Fortran (some might hate it, but I liked it during my CS studies).

I hope Julia succeeds like Python. I have been using Python for quite a while for scientific computing, machine learning and as general purpose language for web services development. I wanted to use Julia for some machine learning problem for predicting prices (time series forecasts), but familiarity and tool support of Python always kept me back and with Facebook's Prophet (fbprophet) library I could do it easily.

I will definitely give Julia a try in coming months. I like this competition and innovation in scientific computing.

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> some might hate it, but I liked it during my CS studies

Isn't a lot of the frustration regarding Fortran aimed towards libraries written by PhDs who don't know a thing about writing maintainable code (because that's not their specialty - not their fault really) and on top of that are so intelligent and specialized in their own field that you end up with even more impenetrable code, while also being dependent on said library because nobody else understands the problem domain in question to the same degree as those PhDs did (emphasis did, to make things worse[0]) when they wrote the library?

That sounds like a frustration layer cake to me, but it's not exactly the language's fault.

[0] https://medium.com/@fjmubeen/ai-no-longer-understand-my-phd-...

I recall at my first job improving a PHD candidates Fortran code that ran experiments on our various mixing rigs.

His initial code's interface was "?" and you entered integer numbers to execute various functions, and there where multiple levels here so you had to memorise the numbers and where you where in the program :-)

I added prompts (with Mixed case Hollerith statements) that showed the options at each level and what they did.

This was to reduce the risk of a botched run which when we scaled up to 1:1 in an 8-1 m dia tank could cost £20k - the cost of a small flat at the time

Do it. I'm using it atm after years of Python and I like it.

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