[IndiChix] [ilugb] [x-post] [event] [BLR] Polling interest for a Julia language workshop

[A. Mani]

On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 11:30 PM, स्वक्ष <svaksha at gmail.com> wrote:
> Not trying to start a language war, but I personally found R
> interesting yet frustrating, especially in terms of
> dependency/installation issues, which quickly turned my "fun" personal
> project into a maintenance nightmare <-- Debugging R code paled in
> comparison to remotely troubleshooting dependency hell. YMMV.

R code should be checked in the interpreted way and if it is written
in the functional /equational way then it is easy.
Dependency handling is auto-magically manageable via 'views'
In 3.0, this has improved further.

Earlier, dependency issues could crop up with deprecated packages.

>

> A big plus for R (and other languages that are a few decades old) is
> the large amount of libraries. Julia is not "production" ready as yet
> - its getting there and I assume ver-1.0 would be the target (not
> sure). Their users list has people from the MATLAB and R (some,
> Fortran) world, including Ruby, Lisp, Perl and Python.
>

Nobody would want to reinvent the wheel... except those coding in
relatively lower level languages like C.
Fortran people will see no point in moving to anything else (small
differences in performance would matter a lot).
There are such people in many of institutes in different parts of the
country including B'lore and nearby places. But you seem to be
suggesting that Julia is not ready for them.


The entire research literature in statistics lands in R, people do not
have time to read all the papers in their own area. ~75% of the R
libraries are written in R. I do not think that this can be easily
rewritten.


> TBH, I'd choose python for any work-related projects but I can live
> with an experimental tool for my personal projects -  atm, I'm trying
> to model some WHO data.
> http://julialang.org/blog/2012/02/why-we-created-julia/, has some
> thoughts from its creators.

This part is surprising.
Coding from scratch was assumed to be possible in Julia in earlier
discussions in R blogger, lists.



Best

A. Mani


--
A. Mani
CU, ASL, AMS, CLC, CMS
http://www.logicamani.in