Hacker News Reader

Comment by Recurecur | Hacker News Reader

"Julia is the opposite - it's better than Python in one particular narrow niche, and cannot replace it broadly. So it has to offer enough to justify going from one language to two."

How so? Julia is a fine general purpose language. I'd go so far as to say it's more appropriate than Python for a wide class of problems!

View on HN

In many ways, Julia is a better python than python, if only for the lack of the (quite insane in the 2000s) program structure by text formatting. That is a misfeature.

Julia is fast out of the box. You don't need Julia + some-other-language to get performance. You can use your GPUs fairly trivially from within the language (though this is implemented as FFI, it still has an idiomatic feel to it).

As for the previous comments on Perl, I am reminded of Mark Twain's famous retort. Rumors of its demise are greatly exaggerated.

Program structure by text formatting is a misfeature, though. What you do need though to make sure code remains readable is strong convention. I think actually that's the most unique feature of Julia (as also alluded to in the post) - how much of julia's ecosystem that works because of social convention (and conversation).

Purely anecdotal evidence, but Julia's support for basic HTTPS server capabilities is immature at best. Sure, it is capable, but the amount of effort to build an web API is much higher than in a language like Python which has had many more years to mature its ecosystem.

That's not to say I dislike Julia. I think it's a wonderful language for numerical computing. Over the next few years I certainly hope to see wider adoption among data science and analytics communities.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com