
Computer scientist Viral Shah helped build Julia from Bengaluru, India - bootload
https://qz.com/963225/julia-an-indian-computer-scientist-built-a-new-programming-language-from-bengaluru/
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plinkplonk
I don't have an opinion on the 'built in Bangalore' part, but I know Viral
(live in the same apartment block and run across him occasionally and talk
tech) and can confirm he is quite the agent of change. In addition to being
immensely talented of course.

In a world of people trying to puff themselves up, Viral Shah is very
understated and humble and flies somewhat under the radar. Good to see his
contributions are getting more publicity.

~~~
ViralBShah
Ravi, you are very kind as always!

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yomritoyj
As an Indian working in India, the 'in Bengaluru' part actually makes me a bit
sad. While Shah may have physically been in India when he was working on
Julia, the project might not have happened without his having gone to the US
for graduate studies. I can't think of any comparable project started entirely
by people working in India.

The reason is not lack of ability: my guess is that at any time India's best
institutions like the IITs or IISc have at least a hundred people who could
build something like Julia. Instead it is perhaps India's poverty that
prevents people from starting something that does not have an immediate
academic or business payoff.

~~~
ViralBShah
While it is true that my PhD experience at UC Santa Barbara was crucial to my
network of collaborators and work on Julia, there are several contributors to
Julia from India who have not gone for graduate studies abroad. There are many
contributions from undergraduates as well. I am just glad that Julia is a
living breathing open source project with significant contributions and work
from around the world, including India.

I don't think that IITs or IISc or institutions are deciding factors. I feel
that people who do interesting stuff (not just in software, but in all aspects
of life) do it despite their backgrounds, conditions, and other labels. Of
course there is poverty, and lack of basic education for millions of people,
but there are also millions of people in India, and the rest of the world, who
have the skill to do very interesting things.

~~~
happy-go-lucky
"While it is true that my PhD experience at UC Santa Barbara was crucial to my
network of collaborators and work on Julia, there are several contributors to
Julia from India who have not gone for graduate studies abroad. There are many
contributions from undergraduates as well. I am just glad that Julia is a
living breathing open source project with significant contributions and work
from around the world, including India."

It reminds me of the collaboration between Hardy and Ramanujan. To me, the
significant contributions from around the world, including India, represent
Ramanujan working on his own in India while your PhD experience at UC Santa
Barbara could be comparable to that of Ramanujan working in collaboration with
Hardy at Cambridge. Hope that is not an overstatement. Your work should serve
as an inspiration to many in India. Thank you for giving us a language to code
in.

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trollpan2
Why every Indian programmer has a burdon to prove that he/she is not an IT
coolie ? How's is that less racist than some redneck assuming all black people
are thugs ?

~~~
ankit84
I am from Hyderabad, India and felt racist reading that title - "IT coolies".
I believe the author just want to make headline.

A lot of innovation happens that gets unnoticed in Silicon Valley or around
the world. People here do not have access to mentorship & peer network so
easily (openly available in California), still being self-motivated and
connected by reading tech blogs, advises, etc. Just top of my head are
following two examples.

* Little Eye Labs => Facebook * HackerRank ==> YC

~~~
digitalzombie
Perhaps OP is just trying to point out that talents aren't just in Silicon
Valley.

It can also be seen as a counter example against those other articles about
how Indian programmers aren't qualify.

I don't see it as a negative race baiting whatever but more as the above
sentence (goto: sentence above).

------
bootload
The original HN post in 2012. [0]

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3606380](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3606380)
/ [https://julialang.org/blog/2012/02/why-we-created-
julia](https://julialang.org/blog/2012/02/why-we-created-julia)

------
joericky233223
It's a comparison between apples and oranges. If he is creating a language he
is at least 10x guy and they are in high demand and don't have to bother about
the things 1x devs have to worry about like... getting a job or getting
financial stability. The problem is always with 1x guys taking jobs of another
1x guys from another nation.

~~~
joericky233223
Simple economics when supply is in shortage demand increases. The shortage for
10x devs are so much that the worst a 10x guy from another country can do is
reduce the salary of another 10x guy. But with the 1x guy it's a live or die
situation, their job is in danger because 1x guys are too much in supply.

~~~
joe5644774
That's sad

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throwaway897932
Viral, how far away are we from a deep learning framework in Julia ? It looks
like there are many streams, from GSoC mentoring proposal for what seemed like
a CuDNN layer, to a LLVM backend for CUDA/SPIR-V. I figure it'll take atleast
2 years for things to stabilize.

~~~
ViralBShah
I assume you are not speaking about MXNet.jl and TensorFlow.jl, which are
really good, and in some ways, even better than the Python wrappers for those
libraries.

There are several pure Julia DL frameworks - Mocha.jl, KNet.jl and Merlin.jl.
What will make things really exciting is native GPU codegen, which has
recently landed in Julia, but will take some time to stabilize and make its
way into these packages.

We do have a deep learning workshop and a GPU workshop in this year's JuliaCon
covering the state of the art and the way forward.

------
shriphani
I know at least one YC fellowship co that was using Julia in production.

There was like 1 evangelist at CMU who used it for their work. The deep
learning wave kinda took things in a rather different direction.

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perseusprime11
What kind of introduction is this?

"In India, the formula for success is drilled into children from a very young
age: get good grades, go to an elite Indian Institute of Technology (IIT),
move to America, and never come back."

So parents will drill this into their kids? Never come back?

------
norswap
Alternative is the new black. Or maybe it is the new indie?

------
kwk236
Why can't people just settle on Python? Julia is going to die anyways in the
near future.

~~~
ms013
The same reasons people migrated to Python in the late 90s from matlab,
Fortran and C++: Python addressed pain points in those languages and
ecosystems. Julia addresses deficiencies in Python the language.
Unfortunately, it lacks the ecosystem: until it gets the rich library set that
Python has, we're stuck with Python since ecosystem is arguably more important
for practical traction than the base language.

~~~
vostok
I don't know how well it works, but Julia does let you use python libraries.

    
    
        @pyimport matplotlib.pyplot as plt
        x = linspace(0,2*pi,1000); y = sin(3*x + 4*cos(2*x));
        plt.plot(x, y, color="red", linewidth=2.0, linestyle="--")
        plt.show()
    

[https://github.com/JuliaPy/PyCall.jl](https://github.com/JuliaPy/PyCall.jl)

~~~
ViralBShah
Works really well and a lot of python scientific software is part of a typical
julia install.

~~~
vostok
Glad to hear that. Will it be possible to overload . in the future?

~~~
StefanKarpinski
There's been extensive discussion of that and yes, it may well happen [1]. The
biggest concern at this point is how to avoid having people abuse such a
feature by trying to fake out class-based o.o. code in Julia in a way that
will look right but work poorly.

[1]
[https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/1974](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/1974)

------
tigershark
Reading this post it seems that Julia is the silver bullet for every
programming problems (or at least the ones addressable in python). I guess
it's not. It is just another (very useful, admittedly) tool for the job. I
really can't stand when every new language or framework or technology or
whatever tries to be _THE_ silver bullet. How long it will be before we learn
that such a thing doesn't exist and we are always going to learn new tools to
solve problems in a hopefully more efficient way? Maybe in the future we'll
have such a thing, but I bet my 2 pennies that it won't be either Julia or any
of the existing languages.

Edit: speaking specifically about the language I think that it's a very good
effort and it can be only a good thing for the current languages ecosystem,
even if I don't appreciate some of its idiosyncrasies.

