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Comment by KenoFischer | Hacker News Reader

There's a growing number of packages written in Julia (http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/packages/packagelist/) and using the PyCall package you can call any python package if you're missing functionality. Do have a look to see if what you need is implemented. Other than that porting existing MATLAB code is extremely easy since the syntax is similar in many cases.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the core devs.

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One thing that is holding me back from porting my Matlab code to Julia is manual loop-unrolling. "It seems that, when using Julia, one needs to unlearn everything you’ve ever learned about vectorisation in MATLAB." [1]. Once the speed with Matlab-like syntax improves, I'll try again.

[1]: http://www.walkingrandomly.com/?cat=59

> Once the speed with Matlab-like syntax improves, I'll try again.

The @devec macro should help, meanwhile:

    @devec r = a .* b + c .* d + a

... will devectorize the expression. It's not perfect, but it's definitely useful.

https://github.com/lindahua/Devectorize.jl

Do you feel 2D plotting is sufficiently developed to be useful at this point?

Sufficiently developed? No way. Is it getting there? Yes I think. There are no plotting facilities part of the standard library, but external packages like Winston [1] are available -- but the syntax was verbose for my taste, so I let it pass.

According to this SO question[2], there was some web-REPL plotting earlier but it is unmaintained now.

[1] https://github.com/nolta/Winston.jl

[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14970817/plot-not-defined...

Agreed. If you are worried about the syntax for plotting, take a look at Gadfly, which aims to implements the Grammar of Graphics language for julia.

https://github.com/dcjones/Gadfly.jl

You can also plot with Gaston, which is a frontend for gnuplot.

https://github.com/mbaz/Gaston.jl

Docs: https://bitbucket.org/mbaz/gaston/downloads/gastondoc-0.5.5....

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