# A review article about Numpy was published in Nature

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/a-review-article-about-numpy-was-published-in-nature/46739>\
**Category:** Offtopic\
**Created:** [September 17, 2020, 12:18am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/a-review-article-about-numpy-was-published-in-nature/46739 "2020-09-17T00:18:06Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 7\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![peters](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/peters/32/5924_2.png) [@peters](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/peters)\
**Post date:** [September 17, 2020, 12:18am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/a-review-article-about-numpy-was-published-in-nature/46739/1 "2020-09-17T00:18:06Z")

</div>

A review article about Numpy was published in Nature. Even though Julia already has superior support for array programming, I think Julia developers can learn something useful from the article.  
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2649-2](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2649-2)

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![PetrKryslUCSD](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/petrkryslucsd/32/215825_2.png) [@PetrKryslUCSD](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/PetrKryslUCSD)\
**Post date:** [September 17, 2020, 2:08am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/a-review-article-about-numpy-was-published-in-nature/46739/2 "2020-09-17T02:08:09Z")

</div>

Such as? ( I am genuinely interested in your opinion, this is not trolling.)

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![liuyxpp](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/liuyxpp/32/9870_2.png) [@liuyxpp](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/liuyxpp)\
**Post date:** [September 17, 2020, 2:55am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/a-review-article-about-numpy-was-published-in-nature/46739/3 "2020-09-17T02:55:51Z")

</div>

Such as publishing a review article about one of Julia ecosystem (SciML?) in Science … lol

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![tkf](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/tkf/32/17635_2.png) [@tkf](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/tkf)\
**Post date:** [September 17, 2020, 3:35am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/a-review-article-about-numpy-was-published-in-nature/46739/4 "2020-09-17T03:35:06Z")

</div>

It’s a good review of Numpy and its history and ecosystem but I guess Julia’s core devs are aware of most of the things in the article. If I were to pick up one thing that Numpy (or Python ecosystem in general) is doing much better than Julia is a good RFC process. Numpy has [NumPy Enhancement Proposals (NEP)](https://numpy.org/neps/) as discussed in the review and Python has [Python Enhancement Proposals (PEP)](https://www.python.org/dev/peps/). It’s really nice that they share the discussion and decision process in a format accessible to the people beyond the Python/Numpy community.

As for technical aspects, the article discusses the array protocol for dispatching to different implementations. IIUC, this is a relatively new thing in the Numpy world. But that’s what Julia is way ahead compared to Numpy.

Anyway, I’d rather just celebrate that the long hard work of Numpy developers and contributors for developing and maintaining an OSS is recognized in the scientific world.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![jling](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/jling/32/212909_2.png) [@jling](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/jling)\
**Post date:** [September 17, 2020, 3:52am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/a-review-article-about-numpy-was-published-in-nature/46739/5 "2020-09-17T03:52:54Z")

</div>

![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/original/3X/3/6/36f1cda192a7de8b8212fa99cca8ee3732e20a98.png)

on a tangent note, the memes about how “new” the paper is seems to be strong. In this particular tweet, saying Numpy is “jax-like” is a bit like saying “C is C++ -like”

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![jling](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/jling/32/212909_2.png) [@jling](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/jling)\
**Post date:** [September 17, 2020, 3:56am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/a-review-article-about-numpy-was-published-in-nature/46739/6 "2020-09-17T03:56:30Z")

</div>

Julia community is pretty ahead (15 years maybe?) in this regard:

> **[DifferentialEquations.jl – A Performant and Feature-Rich Ecosystem for...](https://openresearchsoftware.metajnl.com/articles/10.5334/jors.151)**
>
> DifferentialEquations.jl is a package for solving differential equations in Julia. It covers discrete equations (function maps, discrete stochastic (Gillespie/Markov) simulations), ordinary differential equations, stochastic differential equations,...

> **[Don't Unroll Adjoint: Differentiating SSA-Form Programs](https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.07951)**
>
> This paper presents reverse-mode algorithmic differentiation (AD) based on source code transformation, in particular of the Static Single Assignment (SSA) form used by modern compilers. The approach can support control flow, nesting, mutation,...

> **[Fashionable Modelling with Flux](https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.01457)**
>
> Machine learning as a discipline has seen an incredible surge of interest in recent years due in large part to a perfect storm of new theory, superior tooling, renewed interest in its capabilities. We present in this paper a framework named Flux that...

(just to list a few I happen to know have citation suggestion)

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![ToucheSir](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/touchesir/32/14411_2.png) [@ToucheSir](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/ToucheSir)\
**Post date:** [September 17, 2020, 3:58am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/a-review-article-about-numpy-was-published-in-nature/46739/7 "2020-09-17T03:58:43Z")

</div>

Capturing mindshare may feel like a competition, but it need not be a zero-sum game. Under all of the Twitter flamewars and hacker news rants, there’s a healthy amount of idea cross-pollination across both language communities and the various NumFOCUS projects.

> [@tkf](#):
>
> a good RFC process

Agreed 100%. There is a lot of tacit knowledge and design discussion that could be reified into something more formal. This is kind of handled in some of the more infamous issues in the Julia repo, but coalescing some of the disparate threads on Slack, GH and Discourse into a central, structured location would reduce some of the redundant back-and-forth.