
Julia: A Modern Language for Modern ML [video] - pjmlp
https://www.infoq.com/presentations/julia-ml?utm_source=infoq&utm_medium=videos_homepage&utm_campaign=videos_row1
======
WhyDoPeople
I've been using R for years. A month ago I tried to port a program we use that
takes 20MB CSV files and finds trends. In R, it would take around 5 second to
read the file and give me my data. In Julia it took 30 seconds.

Is this a common occurrence?

~~~
StefanKarpinski
How did you load it? CSV.jl and TextParse.jl are the go-to fast ways to load
CSV data. They used to be trying to catch up with Pandas which was the fastest
CSV parser, but now I think they're in a friendly arms race with each other,
having passed Pandas CSV parsing half a year ago.

------
aub3bhat
Julia is a good language for computational simulation experiments but in a
world that's heading towards heterogeneous compute enabled by GPUs, TPUs and
intermediate representation languages/frameworks like ONNX, TVM [1] and Tensor
Flow its difficult to take claim of "Language for Modern ML" seriously.

If you disagree please show me how many ML researchers/labs/companies use
Julia over Python/C++. Its cool to claim "Modern", "Deep", "ML", but I don't
see any evidence.

[1] [http://tvmlang.org/2017/08/17/tvm-release-
announcement.html](http://tvmlang.org/2017/08/17/tvm-release-
announcement.html)

~~~
nextos
Julia is growing a really good GPU support ecosystem.

Thus, the advantage is to have all your codebase in a single language vs a
2-language solution (e.g. Python && C++).

~~~
aub3bhat
We live in an age of libraries like cudnn which are vendor provided/optimized,
for 99.9% of ML applications you won't need to write custom CUDA code. Further
as I mentioned earlier with Intermediate Representation languages like TVM you
are guaranteed to get the best underlying constructs across different
computing architectures.

Julia might still be good enough MATLAB replacement for Computational
Simulation style tasks, but its clearly not suited for Machine learning.

~~~
sin7
Neither is Python, but people still use it.

------
yalph
There are a lot of articles about Julia being the language of everything. I
gave it a try but did not like the syntax. Why would anyone prefer it over
other languages?

~~~
CarVac
It's like Matlab or SciPy in terms of how easy it is to set up a quick script,
but far more performant.

The syntax is fairly similar to Matlab, which makes it familiar for engineers
like me.

And then there's the speedup. For one benchmark I wrote when evaluating the
language, it had a 60x speedup over Octave, but I'll have to see what happens
when I finish porting over all of my code.

------
dominotw
Sorry for offtopic question.

I have no idea what machine learning/deep learning/AI is. Is now a do or die
situation for me careerwise?

~~~
jernfrost
I studied this at university and have not yet had any use for it. I work with
systems doing computer visualization but almost never write graphics code.
Most programming is more about integrating specialized stuff made by experts
in a field.

~~~
oriolid
I also studied this at university. It turned out I graduated ten years too
early, nobody had data or willingness to use it, and now that things have
changed my resume is full of Java crap.

