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

  • maegul@hachyderm.ioOP
    2·
    3 months ago

    @tschenkel @astrojuanlu @programming

    I’d suppose part of the problem might be that there’s a somewhat hidden 3rd category of user that “feels” whatever added complexity there is in a two-language lang like julialang and has no real need for performant “product” code.

    And that lack of adoption amongst this cohort and your first enforces lang separation.

    I may be off base with whether there’s a usability trade off, but I’d bet there’s at least the perception of one.

    • Hrefna (DHC)@hachyderm.io
      3·
      3 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

        • Hrefna (DHC)@hachyderm.io
          1·
          3 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
        1·
        3 months ago

        @tschenkel @astrojuanlu @programming

        I understood … I was reaching for some shorthand (500 char limits FTW!)

        There’s probably a good amount of work that exists somewhere between your needs and “could be a spreadsheet”, where caring about performance isn’t an issue or hasn’t surfaced yet, either practically or culturally (where the boundaries of what research *can* be done “tomorrow” are of importance)

        BTW, cheers for all the info!!