

Comparison of Matlab, R, and Julia for data analysis (2012) - niggler
http://strata.oreilly.com/2012/10/matlab-r-julia-languages-for-data-analysis.html#

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freyrs3
The author seems to have glazed over quite a bit of the rather mature Python
ecosystem simply because it lives in a general purpose language.

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davemaya
I also have the impression that the research that went in this article is a
quite light. R, ML, Python serve different purposes. Julia is cool but brand
new and feel kind of out of place compared to the heavy weight that are the
other three. The point the author makes about ML and R being black boxes is
misleading. At least, R is open source and you can always look at the gut of
the software, nothing is more easy.

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jostmey
I just discovered "Julia" thanks to this article. It looks like a wonderfully
thought out programming language. Unfortunately, I am having trouble
installing the language on my dated OS. Apparently, I need Ubuntu 13 to run
it!

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c0g
I have had no trouble compiling from source. Are you trying to use a PPA?

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etrautmann
Can anyone comment on the difficulty of porting Matlab code to Julia? It
appears extremely straightforward, but I'm guessing that many toolbox
functions aren't implemented in Julia yet?

In academia, there's tremendous momentum behind Matlab, but Julia would solve
many problems with licensing, building more complex systems, etc.

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KenoFischer
There's a growing number of packages written in Julia
(<http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/packages/packagelist/>) and using the
PyCall package you can call any python package if you're missing
functionality. Do have a look to see if what you need is implemented. Other
than that porting existing MATLAB code is extremely easy since the syntax is
similar in many cases.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the core devs.

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shared4you
One thing that is holding me back from porting my Matlab code to Julia is
manual loop-unrolling. "It seems that, when using Julia, one needs to unlearn
everything you’ve ever learned about vectorisation in MATLAB." [1]. Once the
speed with Matlab-like syntax improves, I'll try again.

[1]: <http://www.walkingrandomly.com/?cat=59>

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pygy_
_> Once the speed with Matlab-like syntax improves, I'll try again._

The @devec macro should help, meanwhile:

    
    
        @devec r = a .* b + c .* d + a
    

... will devectorize the expression. It's not perfect, but it's definitely
useful.

<https://github.com/lindahua/Devectorize.jl>

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lorenzfx
The only reason I can see to use Matlab is that you have invested heavily in
it in the past. If not, I'd always use python instead. I claim it's not less
"tuned for numerics" (with numpy) than Matlab. If you really need a Matlab
like IDE, you should either give Spyder² [1] (I don't use it myself, but I
know some Matlab-switchers that are quite happy with it) or IPython notebook a
try.

In my oppinion, the only thing Matlab has going for it are commercial
extensions and (often exclusive) hardware support (and I don't mean
computers).

[1] <http://code.google.com/p/spyderlib/>

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wiradikusuma
Nice to know there's a JVM-based library
(<http://acs.lbl.gov/software/colt/>). I remember in HN somebody mentioned
something like this but for Scala, anyone?

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apl
You may be referring to Scalala (now Breeze):

<https://github.com/scalanlp/breeze>

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lorenzfx
this was on hn at least once before
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4660544>

