On Fri, Dec 05 2014, Páll Haraldsson <pall.haralds...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes I did read it. Note, I meant would you still recommend (Common) Lisp > for anything, you seem to argue well for Julia (and against > "Lisp"/S-expressions while you're at it?). Note also, I said "would you Sure -- for example, if I wanted a language with macros and a stable standard, I would go for CL at the moment. Or if I wanted well-tested statistics libraries and plotting, I would put up with R for a little more time. For some tasks I would use C. etc etc. (Also, I think you misunderstood something -- I never argued against S-expressions. I like them, very much, in fact.) > Is there a good way to call any (or all) of the S-expressions languages > from Julia? I'm not even sure it's important too, there could be lots of > useful preexisting code. I am not sure why you would want to do that -- reimplementation would almost always be preferable. > Libraries are also "tools", I'm just not at all convinced we need many > languages (for different "purposes", maybe with very few limited > exceptions) rather than just new libraries. That seems to be a failure of > computer science. Well, then don't create new languages. The creators of Julia were convinced they needed a new language, so they made one. I am not sure that eveyone's preferences can be aggregated into a "we". People create languages when they are motivated to do so, this is not centrally planned or coordinated. > Yes, I'm not too worried about me. I don't think I'm wasting time > learning (more about) Julia, I just do not want to point people to it > if there are even better languages available or if there is some > defect in Julia I'm missing. It seems to be a good first language to > learn, not just for "matrix methods" (is that all the Universities > have started teaching with Julia?). Julia as a first language... dunno. Possibly with a well-qualified instructor who puts a lot of effort into it, it could work even at this stage. But in a university setting the lack of a textbook is a problem, also I guess TA's would be hard to find. Depends on the audience and what they want to do with the language. As a self-taught first language: probably not the best choice at this stage. Best, Tamas
