
Julia Language Co-Creators Win James H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software - yarapavan
http://news.mit.edu/2018/julia-language-co-creators-win-james-wilkinson-prize-numerical-software-1226
======
4thaccount
I really like the concept of Julia. High performance numerical software that
is almost as easy to write as Python with a full REPL, LLVM speed, I can view
the code as Assembly or S-expressions, and even wrote macros. In practice,
I've had enormous problems with libraries on Windows. The package manager
seems to always fail. I've figured out how to get passed some issues, but not
all. I'm glad to see they're getting recognition though as it is neat and will
only get better.

~~~
ChrisRackauckas
Which libraries? I haven't found such issues and maybe I could help.

~~~
4thaccount
Hey Chris! Thanks for all the hard work btw. I had a bug originally with the
Julia Opt packages. I think the "Cbc" and "Clp" packages had issues on 0.7 &
1.0 builds. This one was relatively easy to solve in that the windows path it
was looking for didn't match the directory it was installed in. I actually had
trouble with this one on Ubuntu as well.

Just yesterday I tried to install "Plots" on Windows7 using Julia 1.0 and the
installer popped out a ton of red errors. I'll have to go look again later
today, but they didn't seem as straight forward to fix. I doubt that helps a
lot, but I'm curious why these sorts of things seem to happen a lot (or at
least in my limited experience). When the package manager works, it is
fantastic!

I'd like to use Julia for optimization, sparse matrix math, genetic
algorithms, graph theory, and plotting. Having a free and fast tool to do all
of this is pretty amazing. GNU Octave is cool, but doesn't seem to have most
of what I need. Matlab and Mathematica are powerful, but unreasonabley
expensive if you don't need to use them daily. They do have extremely good
integration of scientific tools like plotting. Mathematica is an amazing tool
btw and I hope Julia gets as many features some day.

~~~
ChrisRackauckas
Ahh yes, optimizers with binaries can sometimes be a pain. Plots should be
good though: I don't experience issues with it. Every once in awhile GR's
download server goes down, so `]build GR` or `]build Plots` can help re-
download the binary.

~~~
4thaccount
Finally got "Plots" to work. Not sure what I was doing wrong the first time.
It takes a long time to run though...maybe some kind of first pass
compilation? The Lorenz Attractor demo just complained about not being able to
connect to "GKS socket application", but it seems to have written out a .gif
that runs in IE and is seriously cool :)

