Julia in Wired

[John Myles White]

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/02/julia/

[Sean Goggins]

Posted to social media.  Very cool!  Congrats to Stefan, Viral, John and the whole core team!  

Sean P. Goggins

Sociotechnical Data Scientist 

(816) 368-1364

http://www.seangoggins.net

visit: http://www.sociotech.net

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-- Margaret Mead

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— Max Weber

"Design is what you do when you don't [yet] know what you are doing.''
-- George Stiny, Professor of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

Sent with Airmail

On February 3, 2014 at 8:56:41 AM, John Myles White (johnmyl...@gmail.com) wrote:

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/02/julia/

[Spencer Russell]

"What we need, Karpinski realized after struggling to build his network simulation tool, is a single language that does everything well."

Wow, I'm glad Stefan realized this. I wonder why no one else thought of it sooner! ;)

oh wired.

On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 9:56 AM, John Myles White <johnmyl...@gmail.com> wrote:

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/02/julia/

[Stefan Karpinski]

Oh, man, this is so strange. My stomach is all in knots – it's worse than when I watched the video of the first talk we gave on Julia. I'm dismayed that the article portrays Julia so much as my creation and downplays the roles of Jeff and Viral and doesn't even mention Alan. If anyone deserves the lion's share of the credit for the language being what it is, it's Jeff. And of course it's been a community effort for years now. In any case, my now-very-jittery stomach aside, this is very good press. We just have to keep on doing our best to live up to expectations.

[Spencer Russell]

Hopefully my mail didn't sound like a jab at Stefan, I was just trying to poke a little fun at wired and joke that they get a wee bit hyperbolic at times. Definitely good press and attention though!

I think that most people whos interest is piqued will quickly see for themselves the great language design, quickly growing library support and awesome community you guys have fostered.

-s

[Tim Holy]

Reporters often get things pretty skewed, and anyone who has been through it
knows not to take such things too seriously. I'd say this one is par for the
course. Don't let it stop you from talking to reporters; being too cautious
and declining is generally worse, even though you can predict they'll make
mistakes.

You guys had some good quotes in there. It's great that Julia's getting
exposure!

Best,
--Tim

[Stefan Karpinski]

Don't worry, not taken as such (by me at least). It is great for Julia to get more exposure.

[Steven G. Johnson]

“People have assumed that we need both fast and slow languages,” Bezanson says. “I happen to believe that we don’t need slow languages.”

...says the man whose parser is written in Scheme.

[Eric Davies]

Albeit a super-fast Scheme, from what I understand.

[Aron Ahmadia]

Wow, they have significantly revised the article in the last 24 hours, adding pictures of Viral and Jeff, and better references to Edelman.  Of course, the title is still totally misleading, and there's this second attempt at describing Julia's parallel capabilities: "Julia is also designed parallelism."

Anyway, just wanted to reiterate that this is good exposure for the group, I just passed this article around to some folks at my laboratory who hadn't heard of the language yet and Wired is much more approachable than many other news forms for them.

Cheers,

Aron

[Stefan Karpinski]

Yes, it's much better now. Jeff wrote to the author who interviewed us and asked if these pictures could be added, as well as some reference to Alan. I'm very happy to see that they were included. Too bad it couldn't have been like that from the beginning.

[jtravs]

This article is getting some blow-back in some quarters. See here:

http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2014/02/04/everyone-stop-implementing-programming-languages-right-now-its-been-solved

I posted a comment, but not sure it will get through his moderation. You guys might want to respond.

This is what I posted:

=================

Usually I love your blog posts and find your blog very interesting reading. But in this case I think you should spend a little more time to understand Julia and the people behind it before posting such strongly worded and judgemental posts. The Wired article grossly misrepresents what they themselves say - most of what you complain about is the hype of the journalist at Wired.

Please see the much more reasonable content at http://julialang.org/ and the discussion about this article on their mailing list:https://groups.google.com/d/topic/julia-dev/LPiZaSB2RPA/discussion

From my perspective as a user of many different programming languages for scientific computing (I'm a physicist), Julia brings the usefulness of Python (which you mention) but with the performance of c/fortran.

[Isaiah Norton]

Wow. That is an incredibly rude and unhinged rant and doesn't even deserve a response.

"If you are happy with your current (scientific computing environment), you can keep it."

[jtravs]

Yes, except that that blog is quite high profile and influential... I think a response needs to be made (I tried...)

[Isaiah Norton]

Well, +1 for your comment. It was very measured and well put (and did just go through moderation). I wasn't familiar with the blog.

[Paulo Jabardo]

Nice response. I'm a mechanical engineer and I enjoy programming and learning new languages. The way I see it, very few times we see something different. Julia is one of those times. If you think about it there are very few aspects of Julia that are really novel but all of those features fitting together so well, so seamlessly? Julia really is amazing in several ways beyond being "as fast as C".

For the past few years I had been thinking, on and off,  about a language that would be comparable to Julia. I had a few ideas on what the language should have but there was always some unforeseen problem or some inconsistency. Then I learn about Julia and how it implements many of the things that I had been thinking about but in ways so much better and clearer than I had thought. And let me not forget about the stuff that I  never thought about. Really amazing. Julia is not just some new java/javascript/go/lisp look alike. Probably, the only thing I could complain about it is the indexing starting in 1. And even in this case I understand the reasoning behind it and it is probably the best solution for most people.

Here comes this guy writing a post that borders on rude about an article about a language he clearly didn't even bother to check out. Total failure.

Paulo

[Cristóvão Duarte Sousa]

Same article, but with a more moderated headline: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-02/04/julia

On Monday, February 3, 2014 2:56:34 PM UTC, John Myles White wrote:

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/02/julia/

[John Myles White]

Paulo, I had exactly the same experience you described when I first started using Julia. Hope you’ll stick with it the way I have. :)

 — John

[Paulo Jabardo]

I'm sticking with it. I am almost finishing a simple spectral element solver for the Navier-Stokes equations and the next step is to write data acquisition to read the instruments I use at the wind tunnel I work.

Paulo