jamesjporter

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

I wonder what this means for the future of OpenStack?

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

This sounds really cool; I'd love to see a blog post about it :)

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

It's basically an attempt to bring the user interface of Mathematica or MATLAB (the "notebook") to the Python world. You can get an idea of what this is like in Mathematic by watching Wolfram's demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P9HqHVPeik

jamesjporter

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

We used to use gluster in production but had similar problems to raggiskula and are currently in the process of moving away from it.

jamesjporter

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

This comment overstates the current power of Julia's parallel programming model — as of now Julia has no real tools for shared-memory parallelism and probably will not for another few versions or so. For distributed memory Julia is great, but please do not use Julia if you are being hindered by the GIL.

(NB I say this as a big Julia evangelist. it has a lot of potential but is not really there yet on a number of things, this being one of them.)

jamesjporter

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

It's not a genetic algorithm, but FFTW's planning system actually does perform experiments to optimize for a particular machine's hardware.

jamesjporter

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

    ydash = [1 => y[1]]

creates a Dict that maps for from Int64 to Float64, `=>` is used for declaring Dict literals in Julia. c.f.: http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/stdlib/base/?highlight=d...

jamesjporter

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

I wish someone would try this again for Emacs :(

jamesjporter

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

it's interesting how some software problems have garnered many really good solutions while others are still mired in stuff like this.

e.g. no matter what your preferred source control tool is I think we can all agree that there are some pretty good options out there these days. compare that to the insanity that prevails in packaging in every corner.

jamesjporter

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

I think he might mean "shaking things up" (which Node certainly has done) rather than "taking over the world" (which, as you point out, it has not).

jamesjporter

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

This already exists as a prototype as part of IJulia, see Leah Hanson's awesome blog post about it here: http://blog.leahhanson.us/julia-calling-python-calling-julia...

The collaboration between the scientific Python and Julia communities in recent months has been awesome to watch.

jamesjporter

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

It's less a matter of ability and more a matter of having the time/motivation. If you took a bunch of practicing natural scientists and/or engineers and forced them somehow to enroll in a course teaching Scheme/Clojure/etc., would many of them do well? Almost certainly. If you gave them the choice between a Lisp and something like Julia or MATLAB to use in their everyday work when they need to do some computation? They'll probably choose the later because it's easy and familiar and doesn't have a huge up-front time investment; scientists tend to be very busy people.

jamesjporter

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

I agree with collyw; Lisp is too much for most scientists, who just care about getting their research done and can't be bother to learn all this weird FP/paren stuff [1]. Supplying an obvious, familiar syntax that looks like math written on paper for, e.g., matrix operations, is critical. This is actually one of the core tensions in Julia development imho: balancing having a sane, well designed language (from a programmer's perspective) vs. having a tool that allows scientists to quickly and easily crank out results.

[1]: Note; I am not insinuating that Lisp is bad, I like it personally. Just relaying the response you will get from most practicing scientists who are not trained as programmers.

jamesjporter

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

Julia is designed to be a good general purpose language. There are already a bunch of database drivers; a simple web framework, etc., etc. http://docs.julialang.org/en/release-0.2/packages/packagelis...

jamesjporter

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

Us Emacs users unfortunately have to remap it to control to retain sanity on standard keyboards :P

jamesjporter

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

What tom said; also typing a url in a browser is a lot easier than installing something. This might sound silly but for the typical computer user (and even many nerds!) it makes a big difference.

jamesjporter

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

For those interested in this sort of thing, Julia's Gadfly can also use D3 as a backend: https://github.com/dcjones/Gadfly.jl (although to be fair gadfly has more in common with ggplot than matplotlib)

jamesjporter

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

ido doesn't become really amazing until you add ido-ubiquitous (which makes most minibuffer completions use the ido interface, as opposed to just file opens) and flx-ido (which allows fuzzy matching).

jamesjporter

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

This makes a ton of sense, but it might be unorthodox enough to scare off some users thinking it was a scam of some sort.

jamesjporter

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

Hacker School was an amazing experience for me; I had been programming on and off for ~2.5 years when I attended last summer. Feel free to drop me a line if you want to chat more about it (email in profile)

jamesjporter

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