Comment by zuluonezero
9 hours ago
Over the last three years I have been doing a focussed investigation of a lot of different programming languages and styles (about 38 last count). I was reflecting over the weekend which one I really liked best. Not really for features or functionality or toolset just which one felt 'right'. Julia came out on top as the one language I wanted to play with more and I wish could give a reasoned well justified argument for it but it's really just a feeling. The right mix of intelligent design, power, absence of evangelical idiocy, and a pleasing interface. So nice to get that feeling validated from the random workings of the world and see this release message this morning. Thanks Julia team.
As you mentioned 38 languages, chances are high that these languages are not all coming from a scientific, where 1 index based adressing of items is the norm. What is your take in respect to Julia, wich is one offset based?
> Over the last three years I have been doing a focussed investigation of a lot of different programming languages and styles
I don't know what your invesitgation covers, but a long time ago (2009) someone [0] did an interesting visual comparison of languages. sadly now it seems it's only available at archive.org [1], but I've often gone back to it, partly because it's such an elegant way of looking at some aspects of different languages.
0: http://blog.gmarceau.qc.ca 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20100412073334/http://blog.gmarc...
Cool. Thanks for sharing this.
I liked Julia the first time I tried it years ago. I had some Matlab experience, so it seemed a similar, yet great improvement (no cost! more modern, but lacking some key libs or toolkits). I started programming Commodore BASIC in 1977 on my PET 2001. Then 6502 Assembler/machine language, C, Turbo Pascal, and many more. I have recently gone back to assembler because of AI. I don't miss hand coding assembler or creating macros that don't exist in FASM, but AI allows me to prompt for a terse program, using tried and true asm methods, which I can then audit. Julia has great math and scientific libraries, so my asm stuff isn't in competition with my asm efforts, but I am really enjoying the asm/AI thing for now. Granted this is for my own small projects. Coding is not my main job. I use coding in my other jobs to help me with certain tasks like scheduling, simulations, engineering, and project management. I was playing with the Julia version of cadCAD that was on Python, however, Julia has a lot of other libs that are way better to do dynamic or complexity studies than cadCAD.
Same, Julia really does just feel right to me. Which makes sense since I mostly program in R.
To me it seems as if scripting languages have it hard right now, aside from Python.
AI seems to have changed how people find and use new languages. The influx of new people kind of ... died down for many older languages here.
Agreed. AI doesn’t level the playing field but turns it more in a winner takes all situation. AI is currently best in Python programming from what I hear and this is because it has seen the most Python code.
Even before AI the trend was moving toward increasingly static languages (JS->TS and even a lot more typed Python). Once you accept the static typing benefits, you start to wonder if you could leverage the constraints to drive performance improvements.