[HN Gopher] Julia for Economists Bootcamp
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       Julia for Economists Bootcamp
        
       Author : sebg
       Score  : 53 points
       Date   : 2024-07-24 20:53 UTC (5 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | hatmatrix wrote:
       | There are some very useful rules of thumb here about when to use
       | forward vs. reverse differentiation, etc. Very practical
       | tutorial.
        
       | photon_collider wrote:
       | Has Julia's popularity in scientific computing and data science
       | continued to grow? I haven't heard much about it recently.
        
         | ysofunny wrote:
         | isn't julia just another brand-name ((tm),(r), and (c)) python?
         | like anaconda? or possibly the R language???
        
           | frakt0x90 wrote:
           | Not at all? Totally different programming paradigm and
           | performance. Certain communities pull towards Julia a lot
           | more than others. Mostly I've seen scientific fields that
           | require HPC but don't want to do everything in FORTRAN and C.
           | Paging Chris Rackauckas!
        
           | ForHackernews wrote:
           | No. It's not.
        
           | jordanb wrote:
           | R is an open source version of S, which was a competitor to
           | SAS.
           | 
           | Julia, from when I looked at it years ago was trying like a
           | new version of Matlab or Mathematica. It was very linear-
           | algebra focused, and were trying to replace those packages
           | plus Fortran. They had some gimmicks like an IDE that would
           | render mathematical notion like TeX for your matrices.
           | 
           | Python wasn't the obvious "Fortran killer" scientific
           | language it is today. In fact it's arguably really weird that
           | Python ended up winning that segment. In any case, I think
           | Julia's been struggling since its inception.
        
           | minetest2048 wrote:
           | Julia feels like a Matlab++ with its one based indexing and
           | `function end` syntax Mojo is what you're thinking of
        
             | ls612 wrote:
             | I primarily use MATLAB and what stops me from using Julia
             | is the package management.
             | 
             | Also the VSCode extension has weird performance problems
             | when trying to debug Julia code.
        
         | cactusfrog wrote:
         | I think it has correctness issues
        
           | maximilianroos wrote:
           | Source?
        
             | minetest2048 wrote:
             | https://yuri.is/not-julia/ HN discussion:
             | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31396861
        
         | jarbus wrote:
         | I use Julia regularly for experimental machine learning. It's
         | great for writing high performance, distributed code and even
         | easier than Python for this kind of work, since I can optimize
         | the entire stack in a single language. Not sure if it's growing
         | in popularity but it's really solid for what it does
        
           | nextos wrote:
           | Me too, and I'd like it to succeed. But the major problem
           | right now is that it doesn't have anything that is close to
           | Torch or JAX in performance _and_ robustness. Flux et al. are
           | 90% there, but the last 10% requires a massive investment,
           | and Julia doesn 't have any corporate juggernaut funding
           | development.
           | 
           | This is hurting Julia's adoption. The rest of the language is
           | incredibly elegant, as there is no 2-language divide, like in
           | Python. Furthermore, it is really performant. With very
           | little effort one can write code that is within 2-1.5x of
           | C++, often closer.
           | 
           | One possibility is that something like Mojo takes Julia's
           | spot. Mojo has some of the advantages of Julia, plus very
           | tight integration with Python, its syntax and its ecosystem.
           | I would still prefer Julia, but this is something to keep in
           | mind.
        
         | currymj wrote:
         | certainly yes in scientific computing, less so in ML/data
         | science. there's much of the culture of scientific computing in
         | economics -- lot of heavy numerical stuff in addition to the
         | statistical modeling you might expect.
        
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