On Friday, May 1, 2015 at 1:12:00 PM UTC-4, Steven Sagaert wrote: > > That wasn't what I was saying. I like the philosophy behind julia. But in > practice (as of now) even in julia you still have to code in a certain > style if you want very good performance and that's no different than in any > other language. >
The goal of Julia is not to be a language in which it is *impossible* to write slow code, or a language in which all programming styles are equally fast. The goal (or at least, one of the goals) is to be an expressive, high-level dynamic language, in which it is also *possible* to write performance-critical inner-loop code. That *is* different from other high-level languages, in which it is typically *not* possible to write performance-critical inner-loop code without dropping down to a lower-level language (C, Fortran, Cython...). If you are coding exclusively in Python or R, and there isn't an optimized function appropriate for the innermost loops of your task at hand, you are out of luck.
