Hacker News Reader

Comment by recursive | Hacker News Reader

That doesn't seem to be a particularly distinguishing feature. I know that C#, python, and javascript can all use non-ascii identifiers. I believe most widely used languages can also, but I'm less certain of the details.

View on HN

I think the distinction is that Julia's parser does a relatively good job assigning code-points to unary operators/binary operators/identifiers as appropriate, combined with the fact that multiple dispatch inherently looks more like math.

The difference is that Julia makes it easy to insert these characters (\symbol) so programming with them becomes more natural.

There’s also Swift, of course.

https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-pr...

Julia will read 2π (fixed:thx kps) as 2 times pi which follows the mathematical notation. In all the other languages you have mentioned, I believe even if you can represent pi in Unicode (π) you will have to write 2*π. This can become very irritating when you get to for ex. python/numpy where you will litter your code with * and ** instead of the conventional mathematical notation. Gets a bit tiring if you are looking at more than a page of code. Aesthetics matter.

If you really care about mathematical notations, you should be using Mathematica, not Julia.

Mathematica is definitely better than Julia for symbolic math, but for computational math or algorithm development, Matlab is basically unusable.

I find that really surprising, would you elaborate? I love julia but I haven't found a repl or pluto based workflow that I am anywhere near as productive in for prototyping algorithms as I am in Matlab. And it typically doesn't even run that much slower.

typo, sorry. that Matlab was supposed to be Mathematica. IMO Julia is also better than Matlab here (I use editor+repl, but Pluto is also pretty good), but Matlab is definitely a contender in this area.

Editor from within the repl or outside? If outside, what triggers the repl to reload files? If inside, which editor? I never found a good way to copy and paste a line I got right and liked into a file. I tried drdocstrings but it never seemed to feel smooth bit doesn't help all the keys in julia default to being emacslike and ally muscle memory is vimish. So even after making my repl editor vim, there is stuff in the repl that feels foreign.

editor outside the repl. Revise means that you get auto-reload on save.

Thanks! I thought revise only worked if I used the internal editor.

Why would you use Matlab to "prototype algorithms"? Maybe we have different notions what that means but Matlab is certainly not aimed at that. It's aimed at engineers who want to evaluate their data or design/control embedded devices, and who are experts at their field of engineering while having very little computer science, numerics or programming background.

I work in embedded DSP and controls, and even with a very strong programming background, I find Matlab to be a lot faster to verify my approach for something is going to work than julia or numpy. Not because of all the toolboxes, which I mostly don't use, but because the work flow makes it easier to try stuff fast and visualize it in meaningful ways more easily.

I know no one who uses Matlab for the uses you mention. Basically everyone is using it for algorithm development, that includes both students and companies. And the way I understand it, algorithm development/prototyping also its core application.

Not that I like doing this in Matlab, but that's what everyone uses, though some are moving to python.

Mathematica is both closed source, and very idiosyncratic. It is primarily useful as a way to check things, but I have never seen anyone in actual research use Mathematica.

the Julia REPL allows you to type unicode with \blah, also if you use `?` help mode, you can give it a unicode sequence and it will tell you how to type it, so it's nice quality of life

    help?> Ψ₂ˣ
    "Ψ₂ˣ" can be typed by \Psi<tab>\_2<tab>\^x<tab>

While true, one distinguishing features is the sheer number of unicode binary and unary operators that can be used and overloaded. Take for example ∪ for set union and ∩ for set intersection (eg `set1 ∪ set2`).

(You can also type these easily via latex-style completions, e.g. with \cup<TAB> for ∪ or \cap<TAB> for ∩)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com