Ryan Peterman

So Julia really resonated.

I think I probably is the guilty party of trying to make it more part of the data science wars because I was myself a heavy user of R and was just so disappointed in R. Just so incredibly disappointed in how often I would try to do a project and R just like fought me at every step of the way.

But Python is also like this.

I mean, if you look at all the really great libraries like PyTorch, like, you know, deep down at the end of the day, you're gonna look at C++ code, or you're maybe even looking at like handwritten assembly or handwritten like kernels for GPUs, or at least you're looking at something written in a much lower level language.

And so Julia was really about trying to solve that.

And I don't think it totally won, which I think is probably why you didn't know about it.

I think it was very hip at one point and has become less hip.

But it's actually doing okay.

I think it's in the top 25 programming languages by users in the world.

So I think it's a real language that's really out there.

But for me, the thing that really matters, even though I don't know that it's killing it, Julia is the only people still actually fighting that fight.

Fundamentally, any code that's slow is slow because it's doing stuff it doesn't need to do.

Like that's just sort of the most basic fact about slow code is that the reason you're slow is because you could have done something else and you did something slower instead.

And something like R is doing this pretty easy.

This in Python is not quite as dire, but it's still there is slow.

you end up paying an enormous amount of overhead cost for the possibility that someone might do something more dynamic.

And because they might do it, and to give you an example, which is really astonishing about R is, in R, for instance, the brace that you use to define a block is an operator that can be overridden and the user can redefine.

so they can make braces mean something else.

So that means when you see a brace in code, you can't just be like, I know what this is.

I can move on.