I have finished writing my first real Julia program (800 lines of code). I am using it to solve a nonlinear optics problem. It took me roughly eight days to move my code from Mathematica to Julia. I have spent most of my time (five out of eight days) in debugging and playing with different IDEs. We really need a gui "friendly" debugger.
I struggled the most with the manipulation of arrays. I think my Mathematica / Matlab background did not help either. In Mathematica one can write certain functional vectorized operations using one liners. I had to get out of that mode of thinking. When I started using Mathematica five years ago these vectorized functional operations were hardest to get used to. Now to think in a non vectorized, non functional manner seemed the hardest. Human brain !! Any ways, long story short: each iteration of my calculation using Mathematica took roughly four minutes; Julia does five such calculation in two minutes. That has cutdown my total simulation time from 25 days to 2.5 days. I am sure there probably lots of other tricks to cut down the time at least by half. I will keep that for the next program. *so a BBBIIIIGGGGGG THANK YOU *to all core and package developers. YAY! PS: Did I say thank you to all developers and everybody of this forum ? In case I forgot, Thank You.