> They can 'compile' in an 'optimized manner' using something else ...
Thats actually the issue Julia attempts to solve as highlighted in the article. There are many languages that you can use to express ideas, but when you need the idea to run as fast as possible, you have to rewrite in C/Fortran/etc and then add bindings to to the language.
Julia lets you write inline C, which I believe means that you can still express algorithms simply, but with some parts (trivially) optimized. (Not a huge julia user, but thats my take on it)
Whilst Julia's foreign function interface is indeed good and it is really easy to call into C, the point is that Julia itself is as fast as C. So you don't need to write any C code to get performance, instead just tune the bottlenecks in Julia itself.
For instance, the standard library of Julia [1] is written in Julia itself (and is very performant) and only calls into external C or Fortran libraries where there are well established code-bases (e.g. BLAS, FFTW). Compare this to, e.g., Python or R where much of the standard library is written in C.
I understand that - but wouldn't a really smart compiler be able to do the same thing?
And if you have to be able to write 'some parts' in C for speed ... then why not just use C? And have nice libs for whatever you are doing?
Or intelligently distribute it across processes?
I find it hard to believe that the 'financial industry' has performance requirements that have never been encountered in the entire rest of high tech before ...
> wouldn't a really smart compiler be able to do the same thing?
Well compilers are tied to the language they need to compile so language choice does still matters. As an extreme example, GHC can be much more aggressive with inlining because it's pure, whereas most other languages don't provide the same guarantees.
> And if you have to be able to write 'some parts' in C for speed ... then why not just use C? And have nice libs for whatever you are doing?
Yes I think they could do that, but then they'd need people to write and maintain those libraries. My understanding is they want to find something which strikes a better balance between productivity and speed. Having to write your own libraries to do everything is likely considered a productivity loss.
Ah, I see. I'm no expert, but I'd argue the response is "Maybe".
I think this is what blaze and pypy try to do with python: they compile it so that certain things are optimized. The harder part is that you have to generally hint for the compiler to truly be the best...
WRT to just why not use C, python/R/Julia are MUCH easier to prototype in than C (in my opinion, having used those languages). The "grail" is to be able to prototype quickly, and then identify the hotspots to speed up (which, in Julia's case, would be just inlining with C code).
NIMBY is more "Don't use my road, use the road one block over" - in other words, road is the same but not in front of me. Thats a little different than "Don't use my road, use the road that has 3 lanes and no children on it and is labeled for commuting" I feel like there is a difference in that regard; I personally wouldn't want through traffic on my street, but I also don't want it on the streets next to mine either due to how recklessly people drive when trying to beat traffic.
I've noticed though that the perspective matters. If somebody start complaining about how I parked in front of their house, a typical response is: "I can't believe how annoyed this guy is getting over me just parking here for 15 minutes."
The homeowner however doesn't care that its only 15 minutes of your time, since for him/her its probably all day :-/
You were concerned a lot of people were going to read this and then try to have a picnic on the beach and watch the newest BUDS class?
I don't know about Coronado but at Dam Neck there is a fence that extends at least 150+ feet into the water clearly delineating the base. If the fence is not a dead give away there are signs every 20 feet on the fence that make it crystal clear that the other side of the fence is not a public beach.
Right, but it's good to point out the exceptions to the general rule that all beaches are accessible to the public. Especially in the context of Malibu where there are often wrong or misleading signs.
The interesting thing about a 'diamond' planet is that it would be a waste of time. Diamond's value is superficial - it can't actually be used for anything (except cutting), so mining this planet would essentially cause diamonds to become worthless.
Whats more interesting is a planet made up of rare metals - that would still cause the prices to drop (this assumes the mining can easily generate lots of metal easily, transport costs aside), but can immediately be turned around into something useful.
Rare earth metals are, despite the name, not actually all that rare. They're fairly abundant in the Earth's crust and mantle.
The reason they're more expensive than, say, iron, isn't that they're rare but they're rather difficult to purify from each other. They share the same outer shell electrons (s and d), and what separates them from each other is their f-shell electrons. Those, however, are buried inside the other shells. So their differences are largely driven by differences in atomic radius, differences which are small in chemical effect.
Which is all to say that the cost of producing them wouldn't change too much in that scneario, even if you had access to a trillion tons of ore for free.
Completely agree. The key point is not "applying" these traits, or treating them as "tricks," its simply that the professors there embody that ideal. As an undergrad, it was easy for me to grab 10 minutes of any professor's time, even if it wasn't related to their courses or study. A lot of my classes had over 300 students in them, yet that didn't keep a professor from meeting with me either.
May sound corny, but I'd have to say "Fostering." If you show interest in something, be it knowledge about a subject or field (or entrepreneurship), they will always make sure you have all the resources you need. Part of this (and has been voiced in some of the other comments) is that they will never block you from learning or exploring something.
Students entering MIT are the ones acing every class, being constantly praised by teachers/parents and feeling better than everyone else in high school.
Then they enter MIT, where they find themselves with hundreds of fellow students just like them.
For a lot of personalities, this leads to depression and even in some instances suicide.
That doesn't make sense. People emotionally calibrate themselves against the visible skills of the people in their peer group, not a global distribution of IQ.
Yeah, I know they do that, but it doesn't make sense to me why they do that. If everyone expects to be #1 in the world, everyone but one person is going to be disappointed.
It's not a rational thing, but more instinctive. Your immediate surroundings influence you in all sorts of unconscious ways, but all the people in that global distribution are pretty abstract. You can quote statistics all you like, it's difficult for them to change how you "feel" about yourself.
I think he's talking about the easy-to catch idea-disease that since he went to MIT he should be better off than the average person. This might be true in some scenarios, but not in the startup world where as he mentions he "started to meet people who were [his] equals". Personally I'm surprised he didn't already experience this when he got to MIT, like GuiA mentions.
Dojos tend to be autonomous but we've been working with pygame in Dublin (and HTML5 and basically anything)
It's also only once a week, and plenty of the kids will simply power on when they leave. It's amazing how many come back with working games and their own code after only a few weeks.
Thats actually the issue Julia attempts to solve as highlighted in the article. There are many languages that you can use to express ideas, but when you need the idea to run as fast as possible, you have to rewrite in C/Fortran/etc and then add bindings to to the language.
Julia lets you write inline C, which I believe means that you can still express algorithms simply, but with some parts (trivially) optimized. (Not a huge julia user, but thats my take on it)