2nd Julia meetup in Japan: JuliaTokyo #2

[ther...@gmail.com]

Hi all,

Today we had our 2nd Julia meetup in Japan, called "JuliaTokyo #2".

Here's the list of presentation slides;

http://juliatokyo.connpass.com/event/8010/presentation/

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JuliaTokyo #2 Timetable in English

# Main Talks

1. Introductory Session - @sorami

2. Julia in the Corporation - @QuantixResearch

3. Hamiltonian Monte Carlo Method with Julia - @bicycle1885

4. DataFrames.jl - @weda_654

5. Parallel Computing with Julia - @sfchaos

6. Toolbox for Julia Development - @yomichi_137

# Lightning Talks

1. MeCab.jl (MeCab: Japanese morphological tokenizer) - @chezou

2. Review of v0.3 release note - yoshifumi_seki

3. Using BinDeps.jl - @r9y9

4. Julia Language Anime Character - @kimrin

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We had a survey for the participants on what kind of languages they use on a daily basis. 81 answers (multiple choices allowed), and here's the result;

rank, language, #people

01. Python - 50

02. R - 36

03. Java - 25

04. Ruby - 20

04. C++ - 20

05. Other - 19

06. Excel - 18

07. C - 15

08. Julia - 14

09. Visual Basic - 6

09. Perl - 6

09. Matlab / Octave - 6

09. Scala - 6

10. Fortran - 2

10. Clojure - 2

11. F# - 1

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It seems that Julia is slowly gaining its popularity in Japan too!

- sorami

btw, the name "JuliaTokyo" is from "Juliana's Tokyo", THE most famous disco in Japan back in early 90s.

[Viral Shah]

Thanks for the summary. How was the turnout? I have been noticing lots of Japanese tweets on julia too lately. Do send the summaries - they are fun to read!

-viral

[Sorami Hisamoto]

This time we had around 40 participants, about the same as the last
event (JuliaTokyo #1) back in July.

We had audiences from mixed backgrounds; physics, finance,
bioinformatics, adtech, marketing and web engineering to name a few.

It seems the biggest cluster of people are from R community, people
doing various data analysis. There's a monthly R meetup in Japan
called "Tokyo.R", where nearly 100 people attend each time, and we do
see "Julia" come up in the talks quite often in recent events.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/r-study-tokyo

However these data analysis people are not so satisfied with Julia as
a quick replacement of R yet, because of the lack of packages and
documentations.

The difference between that R meetup and our Julia meetup is that
participants in latter are generally more interested and familiar with
programming.

[John Myles White]

FWIW, I think going after the "data analyst" community is a losing bet for Julia until a few more years have passed. The R community contains very few developers, so most of the R community couldn't possibly benefit from a young language that needs develepors, not users. It's a bad relationship in both directions, because the R folks don't get something useful out of the Julia language in its current state and the Julia folks don't get something useful from the R folks, who generally show up wanting to use code rather than write it.

-- John

[Sorami Hisamoto]

I agree with that.

In our meetups we generally get good reactions from the people who
implement their own algorithms (theoretical physicists, machine
learning researchers, etc.), but not much from the data analysts.

Analyst people come up hearing about Julia much faster than R, and
then after learning about the language they get disappointed as it's
not mature enough to use it off-the-shelf.

[John Myles White]

Yeah, this is exactly my experience. When I first got involved with R, I spent more time with machine learning folks and less with statisticians. I naively assumed that statisticians were as savvy about programming as ML folks, which has proven to definitely not be the case. This lead me to think Julia would be far more useful to statisticians than it's proven to be.

-- John