I'm a graduate student that's switched almost completely over to Julia. Prior to it I worked in both MATLAB (the IDE is so nice, and writing out matrix computations is just great) and Python (for ML). Julia is absolutely nicer to write in than either of the two. MATLAB is slow and at times feels less like a programming language and more like an incomplete and brittle interface with the JVM. Python is also slow, and it feels awkward to use given that it was not explicitly designed for scientific workflows. With Julia I get proper typing, incredible speed, easy parallelization, and a kick ass REPL.
The only thing I truly miss in using Julia is the plotting capacities of MATLAB. I haven't found an environment that can match it in terms of interactivity. Give me the ability to (easily) save interactive figures for later use and Julia would be perfect.
You should check out Makie. Getting it set up can be a bit frustrating if things don’t go right, and there is a small learning curve for using `@lift`, but it is an absolute joy to use once you ramp up.
I use it for my research by default. You can pan, zoom, etc. The subplot/layout system is frankly a lot better than Matlab (and I enjoyed Matlab for plotting!). The best part is that I can insert sliders and drop downs into my plot easily, which means I don’t need to waste time figuring out the best static, 2D plot for my experiment. I just dump all the data into some custom logging struct and use sliders to index into the correct 2D plot (e.g. a heat map changing over time, I just save all the matrices and use the slider to get the heat map at time t).
Wow, I just tried it out. This is really great. And it solves my interactive plot saving requirement. Easy as doing `Plotly.savehtml(fig, "test_fig.html")` :). Thanks!
I have, though I've mostly stuck with the plain PyPlot.jl package due to the familiar syntax and interactivity. Perhaps things have changed, but I just recall being frustrated at the inability to zoom in/out, and again save interactive figs. Perhaps it was just due to the particular backend I was using. I'll give the VS Code experience another try!
The only thing I truly miss in using Julia is the plotting capacities of MATLAB. I haven't found an environment that can match it in terms of interactivity. Give me the ability to (easily) save interactive figures for later use and Julia would be perfect.