TL;DR Let's start with some golfing <http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/>.
Compact Expressiveness: A term I've coined; maybe it already exists, but don't bother looking it up, I didn't, In the case of programming languages, loosely, I'm talking about getting the most out of fewest number of expressives (another term). Concretely, what is smallest number of expressions, statements, characters, etc that a language requires to get any job done? The theory is this is important; the more compactly expressive a language is the better, but only up to a point after which it becomes unreadable. As for me, I've arrived at Julia from machine learning, I like it; I'm new at it. From above, I think it's expressive, but could benefit from being more so. I think I see what you guys want to do with it, and it does look to be an improvement over R, Python, Mathematica, Haskell Octave, MATLAB in terms of features and speed or at least on it's way. I think also it's roughly about as compactly expressive as these languages with some big exceptions. So the idea is. Play golf on Stack Exchange, see how Julia compares, suggest improvements based on results. I don't expect using Julia will win against J and Golfscript in a least number of characters competition, but would expect it to compare with Haskell and tend to win over Python and R. Currently it's not compact enough to do so consistently. I think probably because It's less mature and so is missing some nice short-cuts and mechanisms for data conversion. As an example *readline*(*stream=*STDIN) *readlines*(*stream*) Suggest: readlines should default to using STDIN like readline Suggest: that the default behavior of readline is to *not* include the '\n'; make it equivalent to chomp(readline()) Consider: readline --> readln Specifics above where inspired from trying to play code golf for a particular problem, but illustrates the general idea. thoughts? -Jeff
