I recently gave a Why Julia? talk to a roomful of computational fluid dynamicists and astrophysicists. ( John Gibson, UNH & KITP, Julia - a high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing , Kavli Institute, UCSB 2017-02-02). I got two main skeptical responses. One Python expert …

I guess I can give some historical motivation here. When we started working on Julia in 2009, the Python ecosystem was nowhere near where it is today: PyPy was pretty new: 1.0 was released in 2007 – it was the first version to be able to run any substantial Python apps and there were no plans at t…

I believe dispatch on more than one argument is also possible in c++. However, since meta programming in c++ is Turing complete, it has many more ambiguities since it’s in general undecidable which overload is more specific.

[image] yuyichao: I believe dispatch on more than one argument is also possible in c++. However, since meta programming in c++ is Turing complete, it has many more ambiguities since it’s in general undecidable which overload is more specific. Yes, to complete my example for that case: templa…

Yes. C++ overloading is multi-argument but is also all static — it only works on types known to the compiler. If you want dynamic dispatch, you need to use virtual methods, which dispatch on a single argument and use different syntax. Dynamic dispatch appears to be important. People want to just thr…

For a little personal historical perspective: I first learned about multiple dispatch about 20 years ago in college when taking an AI course that required common lisp. Although common lisp itself doesn’t have OO, the extension (via macros) CLOS (common lisp object system) is a form of OO with mul…

I’ve noticed this too, and I think it’s a concern and an important problem. The most optimistic scenario I’ve come up with is that these kinds of optimizations are perhaps best incorporated into user-level julia code via a set of sophisticated iterators. For example, in ImageFiltering I’ve been able…

The way I see it, there are 2 approaches today: Compiled Language User must give the compiler as much data as possible using the language syntax. Any gray area left is up to the compiler to decide. Given the explicit information and the worse case assumptions the compiler tries to generate the b…

What about recording interations like in reverse diff?

This is wildly off-topic. Please respect that a thread has a subject and stick somewhat to it.

Different for me. I saw a post saying look at our great new numerical language “Julia”. I thought, ah another one, best of luck to you. A couple of years later, Andy Ferris, who worked down the hall from me, said he had abandoned other languages for Julia. I know his background so I took this very s…

Thanks John - I’m glad it worked out for you :slight_smile:

Julia motivation: why weren't Numpy, Scipy, Numba, good enough?

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Julia motivation: why weren't Numpy, Scipy, Numba, good enough?

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