Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> If I had to wish something from Julia, it would be to provide a way to turn off runtime optimization to (radically) speed up compile times for purposes of debugging.

100% agreed on that. I've tried a Julia alias with `--compile=min --optimize=0` options passed in to try to say "please give me responsiveness over runtime performance", but it's still not quite the smooth flow I'd like it to be.

> Dynamic Binding

Beyond performance, it sounds like dynamic binding would have the same hard-to-debug action-at-a-distance problems that global variables often land you in, so I'm not sure it's worth it. (The specific case the author mentions would also lead to type stability problems, but that's maybe beside the point.)

> Structural editing

It's hard to process things from gifs, especially since I can't tell what the starting point of the gif is. It vaguely gives me the impression of the Emmet plugin for HTML development [1].

> I am aware julia has a --lisp mode, but I have never found any documentation for it. So, I don’t agree that all the things in julia are well-documented either :).

Afaik, the `--lisp` mode is intended to be sort of an easter egg, rather than a real mode for practical coding. I doubt many people use it other than Jeff himself. :)

The author doesn't say everything in Julia is well-documented by the way, or even mention Julia documentation. There's just complaints about the Lisp ecosystem's lack of documentation, and perhaps from that an implication that Julia has better docs, but I doubt the author would say all the things are well-documented - there's still quite a way to go for that to be the case.

Overall, the article left me more curious to explore Lisp, not less. It didn't feel particularly gloomy, and exposed me to many features of the language that make me really want to try it out. I hope there's more articles like this - in the sense of being intended for a general (non-lisp) audience, and talking about specific features rather than just "it expands your mind, it's programming like you've never done before" type statements.

[1] https://emmet.io/



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: