OT: Your accomplishments in 2013 and plans for 2014

[Chris]

On Thursday, 12 December 2013 at 10:34:40 UTC, Joseph Rushton 
Wakeling wrote:
> On 12/12/13 01:56, bearophile wrote:
>> Look better, Julia aims also at partially replacing Python as 
>> golden glue in
>> scientific computing, and it seems to have some of the numbers 
>> for it. It's
>> statically typed, it has type inferencing, a refined type 
>> system with
>> multi-methods and more, and a good LLVM-based JIT (that's in 
>> my benchmarks
>> produces a performance no more than 2-4 times slower than D 
>> compiled with ldc2.
>> If you compile D with dmd Julia is often faster for FP-heavy 
>> code. This means
>> it's much faster than any Python code).
>
> Is that taking into account stuff like NumPy/SciPy which is C 
> underneath and (according to colleagues who use it; I don't) 
> super-fast?
>
>> It's better than Matlab about as much as  D is better than C, 
>> and it's already
>> better than Python for some things :-) And Julia is currently 
>> much more
>> flexible than D (there's a REPL, lot of scientific routines in 
>> the std lib, and
>> the JIT). In two years its easy to write code has allowed lot 
>> of people to
>> write more standard library than D community has done in 7 
>> years.
>
> Interesting.  I did take a look at Julia after discovering that 
> a colleague used it; it certainly has many friendly features, 
> but I found myself worrying that some of the "easy" 
> mathematical notation might very readily lend itself to 
> unfortunate typos that in turn would generate bugs and wrong 
> results.
>
> That said, when it comes to stuff like MATLAB/Octave you are 
> often not writing extended code bases but short and easy stuff 
> for data analysis, so there is much less need for concern over 
> this kind of thing.  I imagine the same might apply to Julia, 
> which at the same time looks like it should make it easier to 
> develop larger-scale stuff if it's wanted, despite the things 
> I'm worried about.

My colleagues use Matlab for prototyping, but you cannot use it 
for serious programs. The thing is that all languages like 
R/Matlab/Python etc. are good for testing scientific algorithms, 
but if you want to use them in real world programs (say speech 
recognition), you'll have to re-write it in a language like 
D/C/C++.