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maegul

maegul@hachyderm.io
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52 posts • 106 comments

A little bit of computing and a little bit of neuroscience.

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@hrefna @tschenkel @astrojuanlu @programming

Yea … it seems that things like this are part of Julia’s problem …

that for many the “two language problem” is actually the “two language solution” that’s working just fine and as intended, or as you say, well enough to make an ecosystem jump seem too costly.

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@FizzyOrange

Yea I remember reading about some deeper issues with the language (Dan Luu was quite dark on it I think) and that more or less turned me off. At the time I would have had to have been amongst some dedicated users urging me on to consider adoption.

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@festus

In general, how much more performant would you say Rust is or can be than Julia? Any good resources on this?

What’s interesting about this take is that it targets the whole “two language” thing and implies that it might be a fool’s errand.

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@mvirts

Problem with that logic is that python was essentially “reborn” at some point 2010-2012.

That’s when scipy, pandas and notebooks all came together, and with early pandas putting python on the map more than some (cough - Guido - cough) are willing to admit.

Of course the maturity of the ecosystem by then is part of it … but also pushing through the python 3 situation wasn’t trivial and likely speaks to the momentum the science stack brought to the ecosystem.

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@tschenkel @astrojuanlu @programming

I understood … I was reaching for some shorthand (500 char limits FTW!)

There’s probably a good amount of work that exists somewhere between your needs and “could be a spreadsheet”, where caring about performance isn’t an issue or hasn’t surfaced yet, either practically or culturally (where the boundaries of what research *can* be done “tomorrow” are of importance)

BTW, cheers for all the info!!

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@tschenkel @astrojuanlu @programming

I’d suppose part of the problem might be that there’s a somewhat hidden 3rd category of user that “feels” whatever added complexity there is in a two-language lang like julialang and has no real need for performant “product” code.

And that lack of adoption amongst this cohort and your first enforces lang separation.

I may be off base with whether there’s a usability trade off, but I’d bet there’s at least the perception of one.

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@astrojuanlu @programming

> Maybe nobody (save for the Julia developers) ever cared about the “two language problem”

Yea, it’s what prompted my post. I saw in a rust forum push back on the two language thing but from the lower level side (where they were arguing about introducing lazier memory management facilities on the basis that you should just use swift/Python etc).

And re MATLAB … absolutely! This is not a diss against Julia at all.

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@electricprism

Yea. The basic idea feels like something that’s kinda been forgotten in the wake of big-social’s long dominance and vanilla-ification of online activity.

I even once asked the dev of a popular mastodon app who was expressing interesting in making a lemmy app too … “why not just add lemmy compatibility to the mastodon app”.

Their response was that they couldn’t see what that would look like or how it would work.

It’s all just text messages … I don’t think this is hard!

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@aaaa

A useful lens I find is whether a social media system is good at creating, facilitating and hosting genuine communities.

Alt-social right now is struggling with this I think and, IMO, has plenty of room to grow in this regard.

The difficulty though is that it requires more features in our platforms, some likely non-trivial. That’s a big ask for an open non-profit ecosystem.

An effective means of aggregating multiple parts into a unified view could alleviate this.

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@aaaa

Personally, I’m there with you I think. I only use default web-UIs on all fediverse platforms I’ve used, and advocate for that.

But should multi-protocol systems and multi-platform clients become normalised, I think this goes beyond “to app or not to app”. What I’m talking about could likely just be a web-app.

The issue is more around aggregation and creating something “greater than the sum of its parts” out of open alt-social.

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