Greg Ewing, 24.04.2012 00:32: > Dag Sverre Seljebotn wrote: >> I'm excited about Julia because it's basically what I'd *like* to program >> in. My current mode of development for much stuff is Jinja2 or Tempita >> used for generating C code; Julia would be a real step forward. > > It looks interesting, but I have a few reservations about > it as it stands: > > * No modules, just one big global namespace. This makes it > unsuitable for large projects, IMO. > > * Multiple dispatch... I have mixed feelings about it. When > methods belong to classes, the class serves as a namespace, > and as we all know, namespaces are a honking great idea. > Putting methods outside of classes throws away one kind of > namespace. > > * One-based indexing? Yuck. I suppose it's what Fortran and > Matlab users are familiar with, but it's not the best > technical decision, IMO. > > On the plus side, it does seem to have a very nice and > unobtrusive type system.
I totally agree. They might have been inspired by Lua and tried to make the type system more usable. There are/were many languages that started off with the design goal of being simple, beautiful and avoiding "all that overhead", before they got to the point of becoming usable and consequently quite complex. Even if Julia stays a niche language (and there is nothing that indicates that it won't be so), I think Dag is right in that it is an interesting niche for a certain user group (whether that is enough for it to prevail, well...). It could certainly make a nice addition to CPython. Whether reimplementing Python in it is a good idea and worth the effort - well, there are lots of incomplete special-purpose Python-like language implementations already, so why not have one more. Stefan _______________________________________________ cython-devel mailing list cython-devel@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/cython-devel
