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by steev 2343 days ago
I tried really hard to like Julia and just couldn't get behind it. We used it for a research paper in the area of optimization and by the end of the project I really regretted it. Performance and built in numerics libraries were great, but I feel the language ergonomics are pretty bad. I hate Python just as much as the next developer, but I do find it much easier to use than Julia for research type work.

My biggest qualm with Julia (and maybe this speaks to my inexperience with the language) is that it isn't always obvious when Julia is going to make a copy. We spent about an hour working through some code that was very slow (props to Julia's profiling tools) but couldn't figure out _why_ it was slow. It turned out that despite our best efforts, Julia was still copying a vector despite us using pre-allocated scratch space for the work.

From my point of view, if I am comparing algorithms then Python's performance doesn't really matter and it's ergonomics win. If performance matters I'd just use C++ or Rust.
2 comments
socialdemocrat 2343 days ago
Interesting how we can have such vastly different experiences.

When Julia makes a copy is pretty straightforward and natural IMHO. I would have been curious to see an example of the code you used where a copy was made without you knowing.

I started with Python, but I find Julia better is almost every single way I can think of. Like even if Julia was slower than Python I would have picked it because I find it so much nicer to use.

I wrote an article here about some of the observations I had about using Python after coming back to it from Julia:

https://medium.com/@Jernfrost/python-vs-julia-observations-e...

There are some exchanges further down. Would have been interesting to hear your feedback on some of those things.

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Sukera 2343 days ago
> My biggest qualm with Julia (and maybe this speaks to my inexperience with the language) is that it isn't always obvious when Julia is going to make a copy.

If you're talking about slices of an array, those always create a copy unless created with the @views macro (or the equivalent function call).

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