Comment by Karrot_Kream | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Karrot_Kream | Hacker News Reader

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> In Julia, things are really small and composable. For example, you have a probabilistic programming library like Turing and a differentiable programming one like Flux, and it's trivial to implement some Bayesian neural networks.

I was taken aback when looking at Turing for Bayesian modelling that the distributions were just the standard distributions found in the Distributions package! In Python, every Bayesian framework has its own implementation of everything from distributions to log probabilities, but it all composes in Julia.

> It's small and beautiful, but it needs more manpower to compete against Python.

Agreed. Docs of major projects are still incomplete or non-existent, there's a lot of projects that have been nigh abandoned (cough naive bayes cough), and the composability of Julia coupled without strong leadership leads to an ecosystem of overlapping functionality. Still, I hope by leveraging PyCall, Julia can overcome some of these issues.

> but it all composes in Julia.

You mean that, in Julia, we the users have to "compose" our own implementations of models (e.g. log probabilities), as opposed to using the already-made ones in Python?

More like... most of the scientific Python stack has settled on a third party library, NumPy, to provide support for numerical computing. That includes providing data types like arrays. Tensorflow doesn't use NumPy's data types, so if you want to use Tensorflow Probability, you need to convert everything you've done in NumPy (or things that are built on top of NumPy, like Pandas) to TensorFlow, and use TensorFlow's functions/methods to manipulate them.

(The same is true if you use something that's built on top of Stan or JAGS or BUGS or something else.)

In Julia's Turing.jl, everything is built around data structures that are first-class parts of Julia, so there's no need to have special Turing.jl versions of, say, probability distributions.

https://www.tensorflow.org/guide/tf_numpy

yes, and if you go to that link, you can see its experimental, for TF 2.4 _and_ the notebook on github was created Aug 3, 2020. So that is relatively new and most likely has a ways to go before further adoption. Its good that option exists, but doesn't seem very backwards compatible. That doesn't negate the points made in the parent.

It will mature before the Julia ecosystem mature so the value proposition of Julia is out weighted by it's lack of ecosystem. Had they transparant interoperability with Python like Kotlin is for Java, I would consider it. They could at least rewrite their vm to use the truffle framework from graalvm so that they would become interoperable with Python on graal which in a few years will mature.

What do you know about the Julia ecosystem?

If they weren't already-made in Julia yes (and a library didn't do the work of composing it and presenting as a monolith, since pretty much all large frameworks like Flux and DiffEq are also made this way). Although you're maybe trying to imply that everything that anyone needs is already made in python, I occasionally end up finding small issues between my use case and what's immediately available and I have to twist my problem into a stitch of "kinda what I need" pieces (like having to change my problem into a vectorization problem, a long chain of corrections using pandas to fit an interface and then some weird logic to transform the table into a CSV in memory to use postgres' COPY or UPSERT because pandas to_sql is not flexible enough and iterating and inserting is too slow). Sure I always achieve the result using already-made stuff, but the glue logic ends up taking more time and honestly ends up quite hard to maintain for other people (or even myself after a few months) after all it isn't my algorithm logic but some adhoc puzzle I just solved.

In Julia, if the DataFrame library is missing something I can just loop like an array and have a method that works just as well as if the library provided it, the CSV, DB and table processing libraries all use the same conventions so if library "A" solves my issue I'm not forced to use the same library "A" serialization method. Basically instead of twisting the logic to what I'm given, I just fill in the blanks. Sure Julia has way more blanks, but Julia also has half of the age of some of the Python's library I use, it's more about the maturity of the community than anything to do with the design choices of the language and I can only hope it gets better and better with time.

for example, if you have a relu activation function, it's literally just: relu(x) = max(zero(x), x)

now python has like 5 identical numpy-like API re-implemented in multiple framework. That's where resources is wasted (unnecessarily)

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