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Programming

Julia Language Co-Creators Win James H. Wilkinson Prize For Numerical Software (mit.edu) 108

Posted by msmash from the for-the-record dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Three co-creators of the MIT-incubated Julia programming language are the recipients of the 2019 James H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software. With origins in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Department of Mathematics, Julia is a programming language created in 2009 by Jeff Bezanson PhD '15, former MIT Julia Lab researchers Stefan Karpinski, and Viral B. Shah, and professor of mathematics Alan Edelman. The prize will be awarded to Bezanson, Karpinski, and Shah "for the creation of Julia, an innovative environment for the creation of high-performance tools that enable the analysis and solution of computational science problems."

Released publicly in 2012, Julia has over 3 million downloads and is used in over 1,500 universities for scientific and numerical computing. "I am proud of the intellectual contributions of the Julia Lab, which applies the latest in computer science to science and engineering problems, while engaging interdisciplinary collaborations all over campus and beyond," said Edelman. "Julia is increasingly the language of instruction for scientific computing at MIT."
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Julia Language Co-Creators Win James H. Wilkinson Prize For Numerical Software More

Julia Language Co-Creators Win James H. Wilkinson Prize For Numerical Software

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  • Languages are not that important (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @11:40PM (#57873884)

    Libraries are. On the other hand, every real expert can learn a programming language in a week or two, so special-purpose languages have merit.

    • Re:Languages are not that important (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @11:55PM (#57873936)

      On the other hand, every real expert can learn a programming language in a week or two

      This is only true for "normal" programming languages that are a series of instructions executed in sequence, with standard control instructions such as loops and conditional branches. So all you have to do is learn some new syntax.

      But many programmers have difficulty learning languages that don't fit that paradigm, such as Prolog and Verilog.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        That is why I said "real expert". Same-paradigm is easy and anybody smart can do it. You are correct that many programmer will find it very hard or even fail even to learn a language from a different paradigm. Heck, many will fail to learn a language from the same paradigm in a short time. Verilog does not quite count IMO, as learning it is not so hard, but doing useful hardware in it requires additional knowledge. Same, for example, with Computer Algebra languages like Axiom, where you need to understand t

        • That is why I said "real expert".

          How do you know if an expert is "real"? Does he also have to be a Scotsman?

          Verilog does not quite count IMO, as learning it is not so hard, but doing useful hardware in it requires additional knowledge.

          Verilog is a Turing complete language. Most Verilog programs are not hardware descriptions, they generate FPGA bitstreams.

    • Re: Languages are not that important (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      There is a reason fortran is still used for numerical software. Maybe julia will finally replace it

      • Doubtful, those Fortran libraries are called and used from many other languages.... no need to rewrite them

    • Not insightful. Wrong, in fact.

      First, the nebulous "real" attached to his "expert" .. wants his cake while eating it too.

      Second, Julia is for scientists, not programmers, in the same way that VBA is for accountants, not programmers.
    • One can only assume you have never developed a professional grade piece of software in your life. Nobody with a modicum of competence in software development would claim that the language choice you make is anything other than the most important decision to be made when embarking upon a development effort. Next you'll be saying it doesn't matter if you use git or RCS.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Au contraire. I said the language used does not matter much to the _developer_ (if said developer is a real expert). You are saying it is important to the _project_. That is a bit different. Depending on the project, that may or may not be the case, but it is hardly "the most important decision". That thinking is for people with low levels of insight and experience.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      On the contrary, this is one of those cases where the language matters, I think. Julia's plan is pairing Matlab's ease of use with C-level performance, and you simply don't get there without some serious design effort on the language and its standard library. The authors have various examples on why you can't simply take Matlab and improve its compiler; for instance, the type stability of sqrt.

    • Libraries are. On the other hand, every real expert can learn a programming language in a week or two, so special-purpose languages have merit.

      intermediate lang/ffi pretty much solves the library issue. It's the language that allows you to glue and model your job. In a week you get the syntax, takes longer to understand the language implementation quirks and adopt a style that works and looks native to the language.

  • Much of the world would love to see open-source Computational Fluid Dynamic and Finite Element Method solutions. Some cool things can come of it, such as a placing a built-in Julia interpeter in a data visualization program such as Paraview (or ImageJ) Now that Java is irrevocably fucked, I would like to see a Julia library that will mimic OpenProcessing, because we need a good graphic set and the mouse. There are some charting/graphic Julia libraries, but I am not aware of anything that will do what Proce

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Huh? There are tons of open source CFD codes....

      • Well, let's see....

        OpenFoam has cross-platform issues. It doesn't play well on Windows outside a virtual Linux environment..

        Code Saturne's multi-language support is not good. It's French, and not only that, it's French, and so is Aster..

        Elmer I had hopes for, but their focus seems to be academic sized(small) studies. Oddly, I don't think it will accept an STL, for remeshing, so you are looking at GMSH or Salome for Meshing, though FreeCAD has come a long way, and is the rising star for preparing studies. .

      • And Julia would be great because the same code could be transportable without all the nonsense.

  • Octave should just close shop (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It's old and buggy. Half the libraries are broken because they are never updated to match the new releases. It's a mess. It's time to pull the plug on Octave.

    Julia came along at just the right time

  • I went to a meetup a few years ago where some of its developers presented Julia. I left at the break because it was clear that this was yet another mutt offspring of a couple of popular scientific languages - R and Matlab - without even a vague idea of grammar or consistency. Also, yet another language that works with arrays but does not know how to treat them as first-class citizens. "An array? Let's start a loop!"

    The initial comment about language not mattering could have come from anyone who think

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