I want to learn Julia but I have a very big concern: does it actually alter your personality in a way that makes you condescend to everyone about their inferior programming languages, or is it just that people who already are condescending choose to learn Julia?

Haha, this is a great question.

I remember thinking about this before I knew JULIA. I can't remember that time clearly. I have tried to black it out. Presumably, I was just sitting nude in a cave bashing two rocks together covered in faeces and confused shame...just like you.

Here are things I can guarantee: learning JULIA will make you stronger, more agile, your IQ will double, women will be able to smell your dominance, children will run from you screaming in terror, you will be able to grow a thick lustrous beard (even if you are a woman), you will be able to talk to animals and lead them in battle, and you will be able to throw a spear through a 5m deep concrete wall from 200m.

EDIT: I forgot, if you do learn JULIA be sure to avoid any contact with indigenous societies. They will likely think you are a God. You go to the Amazon one time, and suddenly these people are building shrines, making human sacrifices, and carving intricate wood etchings of benchmarks and terse, readable function compositions (they told me they were still using Python2.7...lol).

LOL. That's a shame. I like children, so I guess I'll just have to stay locked in this naively blissful void that I've been mischaracterizing as a 'brain' my whole life.

Answering your question in good faith, even though I am unsure it was asked that way-

I am not a Julia programmer, I mostly write in python, but I find their community welcoming and not condescending at all. I think it would have a positive impact on most people’s personality

The language is very interesting too but doesn’t yet have a google, apple or msft behind it so I would understand why lovers of it maybe overstep a little promoting to try to keep it alive

Personally I find the integration with cuda to be really well done and I could see it being easier than python for highly customized deep learning (custom kernels etc)

Your comment above seems kind of unnecessarily mean spirited to me - maybe I’m reading it wrong?

I was surprised - because I remember you responding to the “I made 500k with machine learning guy” and being really impressed with your willingness to try to teach the guy without shitting on him (I’m an ex algo/hft guy and think someone with your knowledge could have gone that route very easily)

It is unjustifiably mean spirited to Julia programmers in general. I admit that it is an unfair characterization of everyone who programs in trendy languages. I just got irritated that he commented with pure snark to what looks like an amazing paper. And I find being witty and mean instead of blandly authoritarian is the best way to handle those people.

Anyone who wants to learn, great. Anyone who wants a one-sentence snark, I'm not going to be as open to helping out.

There is no need for generalization, there are many people in the community that respect and enjoy other languages, and most people also frequently use Python and R for most things that Julia is still not mature enough.

But it's certainly hard sometimes for people who learned of powerful non mainstream languages, having to see people putting an amazing amount of resources and effort to provide every functionality to mainstream less powerful languages that would be almost free in said powerful language (be it syntax extensions with macros, high performance dynamic code without using FFI, parallelism, better compile-time checking...). It's probably what Lisp users had to deal with for 60 years now. Or more recently people who learned Rust but still have to deal with a world of C++.

Just wanted to say I love your work in clojure

Sorry, that's dragan (not sure his exact HN username) and not me and yes, his work is amazing.

oh! very sorry... bad assumption on my part based on the lisp comments

As someone with zero exposure to Julia can you provide some reasoning for why? (Honest question)

Quick answer: Julia is often faster than Python and other high-level languages. Rather than writing high-level code in Python, R, or Matlab and performance-critical code in C, the idea is that one writes the whole thing in Julia.

Edit: I agree that the "...more interesting" comment above sounds condescending. I have not found the Julia community to be condescending.

One of the thing I like from Julia compare to Python is that it have the concept of missing data representation. Python's data science library represent it via NaN or Null which is good enough for most cases but not all cases.

I often wish R's syntax was cleaner and faster, Julia is may accomplish this. I don't think Python is a great substitute for R in many areas where statistic is heavily used and influenced. I've used Python for Deep Learning and NLP. Time series and many other statistical base stuff I use R.