Did #julialang end up kinda stalling or at least plateau-ing lower than hoped?

I know it’s got its community and dedicated users and has continued development.

But without being in that space, and speculating now at a distance, it seems it might be an interesting case study in a tech/lang that just didn’t have landing spot it could arrive at in time as the tech-world & “data science” reshuffled while julia tried to grow … ?

Can a language ever solve a “two language” problem?

@programming

  • Hrefna (DHC)@hachyderm.io
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    4 months ago

    @maegul

    Considering, it may be worth highlighting that tools like Jax exist as well (https://github.com/google/jax). These have even become an expected integration in some toolkits (e.g., numpyro)

    It may not be the most elegant approach, but there’s a lot of power in something that “mostly just works and then we can optimize narrowly once we find a problem”

    It doesn’t make a solution that solves this mess bad, but I do wonder about it being a narrow niche

    @tschenkel @astrojuanlu @programming

    • tschenkel@mathstodon.xyz
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      4 months ago

      @hrefna @maegul @astrojuanlu @programming

      Interesting. But seems to be limited to arrays. And I’m wondering what the benefit is over regular Numpy. In my tests I did not find Numpy to be slower than any other Blas or Lapack implementation (if type stable and immutable).

      Do you have any comparisons?

      In any case, I don’t think it would work for solving ODEs unless I’d implement the RHS in a JIT compiled function.

      I used to love Python, but now it looks like a collection of add-ons/hacks to fix the issues I have.

      • Hrefna (DHC)@hachyderm.io
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        4 months ago

        @tschenkel

        Mostly its advantage as far as arrays go is its ability to push things out to an accelerator (GPU) without making code changes. Also its JIT functionality is a good bit faster than using pytorch’s (at least anecdotally).

        My experience with it is not at all related to ODEs (more things like MCMC) and I have no direct experience with its gradient functionality and only limited with its auto vectorization, so take my experience with a grain of salt.

        @maegul @astrojuanlu @programming

    • maegul@hachyderm.ioOP
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      4 months ago

      @hrefna @tschenkel @astrojuanlu @programming

      Yea … it seems that things like this are part of Julia’s problem …

      that for many the “two language problem” is actually the “two language solution” that’s working just fine and as intended, or as you say, well enough to make an ecosystem jump seem too costly.