[canjobear]

I recently started a project in Julia and, excited by the prospect of a smart JIT compiler, wrote everything in a declarative function style with maps, reduces, and filters. The result was slower than than equivalent Python code. I swallowed my aesthetic sense and rewrote every function imperatively, with for loops updating some mutable array, and now it is quite fast. But I am no longer enjoying coding as much. I switched to Julia for speed, but that speed seems to come at the cost of having to write very imperative code.

In terms of day-to-day programming, I'm not sure what makes Julia a better functional language than Python or Ruby. From my limited experience, it isn't speed.

I understand that work is under way to speed up anonymous function calls and to improve type inference on arrays resulting from `map`, etc. Once that is done then I will consider Julia a nice functional language.