stack is in Base in 1.9 or in Compat.jl for earlier versions.
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Thanks folks, you’ve taught me some useful things.
My problem is that I’m not a regular user of Julia - I’ll use it every day for a few weeks or months, and then not touch it again for months or a year. So I’m constantly having to relearn things, and Julia is just not as easy to use as say Mathematica - although it’s much more performative.
I teach at a university, we get Mathematica and Matlab for “free”. I’d like to use Julia more, but the user-unfriendliness towards programming neophytes is a deal breaker for undergrads.
In Mathematica, tensors are just lists of lists of lists…that happen to have uniform lengths. This is bad for speed, but beautiful for data management: every element is always accessed the same way, and arrays can be freely and easily reshaped. This is great for tyros like me.
Julia made the decision to sacrifice transparency for speed, which is perfectly justifiable. But it will never replace user-friendly systems like Mathematica.
I don’t understand why this is better than representing them as arrays? Arrays seems much more natural and simple and obvious to me. What are the advantages of nested lists over arrays?
This isn’t an opinion, but a statement if fact, and imho this is flat out wrong. Julia is without doubt the most transparent language I have come across, open source and mostly implemented in itself so you can easily find out how everything works. There’s also a heavy emphasis on consistency and internal logic which reduces (not removes) the amount of black box magic (until you dig deep, of course).
The transparency of the language is one of its main attractions, imo.
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