[Cython] Julialang

[Dag Sverre Seljebotn]

On 04/24/2012 12:32 AM, Greg Ewing wrote:
> Dag Sverre Seljebotn wrote:
>
>> I'm excited about Julia because it's basically what I'd *like* to
>> program in. My current mode of development for much stuff is Jinja2 or
>> Tempita used for generating C code; Julia would be a real step forward.
>
> It looks interesting, but I have a few reservations about
> it as it stands:
>
> * No modules, just one big global namespace. This makes it
> unsuitable for large projects, IMO.

As far as I know it seems like namespaces are on their TODO-list. But of 
course, that also means it's undecided.

> * Multiple dispatch... I have mixed feelings about it. When
> methods belong to classes, the class serves as a namespace,
> and as we all know, namespaces are a honking great idea.
> Putting methods outside of classes throws away one kind of
> namespace.

Well, there's still the namespace of the argument type. I think it is 
really a syntactic rewrite of

obj->foo(bar)

to

foo(obj, bar)

If Julia gets namespace support then the version ("method") of "foo" to 
use is determined by the namespace of obj and bar.

And in Python there's all sorts of problems with who wins the battle 
over __add__ and __radd__ and so on (though it's a rather minor point 
and not something that by itself merits a new language IMO...).


> * One-based indexing? Yuck. I suppose it's what Fortran and
> Matlab users are familiar with, but it's not the best
> technical decision, IMO.
>
> On the plus side, it does seem to have a very nice and
> unobtrusive type system.
>
>> the next natural step is to implement Python in Julia, with CPython
>> C-API compatability. Which would be great.
>
> That would indeed be an interesting thing to explore.

Dag