Ryan Peterman

Yeah, well, certainly I think I made it more of a part of the war.

I don't think it had to necessarily be part of it.

Although I do think also like the simple fact of the reality is like programming languages are products and products exist in an ecosystem where they're in zero-sum competition and claiming that they're not in zero-sum competition is like a very cute thing that people say is appropriate, but it's clearly false and I think just makes everyone worse by misleading them.

But like, I mean, so Julia for me, and it's actually sort of why did Julia so appealing?

I mean, for me what Julia's pitch was like, we should be able to write code in a high level language that looks like Python or like MATLAB, which is really the language it was originally designed to destroy.

It was really designed to get rid of MATLAB.

It was made by MIT math people who wanted to get rid of MATLAB.

And it really targeted that market much more than data science at start.

And I think I was involved in pushing it towards data science.

But to me, the thing I always do when I give talks about Julia is be like, listen, let's look at the R function for distance, like compute a distance matrix between a bunch of vectors.

So you get pairs of vectors, and you get all the distance matrix.

If you look at that function and then you actually try to figure out how it's implemented in R, what you find is C code that is very reasonable C code that is just a bunch of for loops, like loop through all the rows and all the columns and then compute the distance at that row and you're done.

If you basically take that code verbatim and just translate it naively into R, you're going to take some type information away.

You're going to get rid of some like ints and float signatures.

But otherwise, you're going to basically write for loops that look exactly the same.

The R code is going to be like somewhere between 1,000 to 10,000 times slower than C.

And this to me was the thing that just like drove me insane when I'm just like, wait, what?

Like these two programs are like 80% the same.

Why is one not as fast?

And Julia really was all about this notion that like that was unacceptable.