On 2014-08-21, Bill Hart <goodwillh...@googlemail.com> wrote:
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> Julia can already call Python functions (and I don't mean in some 
> theoretical, technical sense, I mean very practically via an interface 
> designed explicitly for such). So it's not necessary to "move" Sage from 
> Python to Julia. Other Scientific Python projects haven't done this.
>
> There are other reasons why this is not necessary, because of other 
> technical advances that will become available in the coming few years (they 
> are working in labs right now).
>
> Instead, the Sage project should do two things in my opinion:
>
> 1) Make Julia part of the Sage ecosystem (it's already had a huge 
> investment from the scientific and statistical communities, so this is a 
> no-brainer if you want to embrace that community)
>
> 2) Invest in the technologies that are making Julia successful (jit, 
> dependent typing, metaprogramming, type checking and inference, etc.)
>
> Whether 2 involves rewriting some functionality in Julia, or simply finding 
> ways of adding such functionality to Python is really neither here nor 
> there.
>
> What Sage can't do is just stagnate and ignore progress. If it does, it 
> will be brushed aside as if it wasn't even there, as has happened over and 
> over again in the history of computer algebra! And it's happening to Sage. 
> A few years ago, people at conferences were excitedly demonstrating stuff 
> in Sage. This year, they've moved back to Magma.

Perhaps, it's merely thanks to Simons Foundation making Magma free for all
universities in USA?

Oh, perhaps you mean that Magma has switched over to Julia? :-)

>
> As I have already mentioned, the technology behind Julia can in theory do 
> generic programming even faster than C or C++. So it is a strictly superior 
> technology to what has been available in the past. It's a genuine 
> innovation, whether the Julia designers see it that way or not.

Wait, are you saying there is an optimising Julia compiler available?
Without it, it sounds a bit like claims by Java poeple saying that their
JIT compilers are so great that they beat C compiled with gcc...
My cursory look into Julia only poped out JIT stuff, not a real complier...

>
> The Julia developers are not like me. They like Python and embrace it (many 
> of them are pythonistas). They would never go around claiming Julia is in 
> any way superior to Python. But I am not one of them and can go around 
> making such claims, because in the sense that I mean it, it is true.

What personally put me off Julia when it was announced was that
"We are power Matlab users" in the top of the blog post announcing
Julia project back in Feb 2012. I thought "oh yes, swell, we do need a better
Matlab nchoosek() and 'everything is a matrix' greatness :-)"...

Dima

>
> Bill.
>
> On Thursday, 21 August 2014 20:33:00 UTC+2, mmarco wrote:
>>
>> So, would it be thinkable of to move sage from Python to Julia? Sounds 
>> like a titanic task, but sounds like if there are so many advantages in 
>> Julia with respect to Python, it could be worth it.
>>
>

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