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Julia vs Pharo

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SergeStinckwich

Julia vs Pharo

Hi all,

I find a recent paper about Julia that might be appealing for people
interested in doing scientific computation in Pharo (like the
SciSmalltalk community) : http://arxiv.org/pdf/1411.1607v1.pdf
"Julia: A fresh approach to numerical computing"

Julia is a new dynamic programming language for scientific programming
with much higher performance than R or Python.

I found that some concepts are quite closed to Pharo in fact:

- meta-programming and code generation
- arbitrary precision integer
- JIT compiler (based on LLVM)
- call to C API

What is missing in Pharo at the moment:
- multiple dispatch
- arbitrary precision float
- dynamic dataflow type inference
- optional type annotations (maybe with pluggable type extensions for Pharo ?)
- special matrices types like spares or dense matrix, tri-diagonal, etc ...
- vectorization

Regards,
--
Serge Stinckwich
UCBN & UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC)
Help fight Ebola by joining the Computing for Ebola Challenge
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werner kassens-2

Re: Julia vs Pharo

Hi Serge,
interesting indeed, thanks for drawing my attention to that paper.
werner

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SergeStinckwich

Re: [smalltalk-research] Re: [Pharo-dev] Julia vs Pharo

In reply to this post by SergeStinckwich

On Sun, Nov 16, 2014 at 1:45 AM, Alexandre Bergel
<[hidden email]> wrote:
> Hi Serge!
>
> Thanks for sharing this.
>
> I indeed believe that scientific computing will play a big role in Pharo adoption by a large public

The problem is that you need to invest at least 5 years of work before
having some impact in this domain.

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Serge Stinckwich
UCBN & UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC)
Help fight Ebola by joining the Computing for Ebola Challenge
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werner kassens-2

Re: Julia vs Pharo

In reply to this post by SergeStinckwich

>... What is missing in Pharo at the moment:
>- multiple dispatch
>- arbitrary precision float ...

Hi Serge,
there exists an arbitrary precision float package made by nicolas cellier:
https://code.google.com/p/arbitrary-precision-float/wiki/ArbitraryPrecisionFloatForSqueakAndPharo
ok, its not builtin into pharo, but this is not really a problem, one uses those things more for crosschecking, where speed is not really a problem.
re multiple dispatch, actually this was the first and most important thing i found missing when i discovered pharo ,squeak, smalltalk. otoh there exists a package that does this; if i remember correctly the name is helvetica. i read the papers about that package but never downloaded that package essentially for two reasons:
- i'm a speed freak and feared this would slow down my programs too much. i thought this is something that should indeed be hard coded.
- although, if i remember correctly, this package _is downloadable, it was in a way deeply hidden in the internet (not in the usual places like smalltalkhub or squeaksource) as if the author did not really want it to be used by everybody for every task.
werner

SergeStinckwich

Re: Julia vs Pharo

On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 2:56 PM, werner kassens <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>... What is missing in Pharo at the moment:
>>- multiple dispatch
>>- arbitrary precision float ...
>
> Hi Serge,
> there exists an arbitrary precision float package made by nicolas cellier:
> https://code.google.com/p/arbitrary-precision-float/wiki/ArbitraryPrecisionFloatForSqueakAndPharo

Great to know such a beast exist ;-)

> ok, its not builtin into pharo, but this is not really a problem, one uses
> those things more for crosschecking, where speed is not really a problem.
> re multiple dispatch, actually this was the first and most important thing i
> found missing when i discovered pharo ,squeak, smalltalk. otoh there exists
> a package that does this; if i remember correctly the name is helvetica. i
> read the papers about that package but never downloaded that package
> essentially for two reasons:
> - i'm a speed freak and feared this would slow down my programs too much. i
> thought this is something that should indeed be hard coded.
> - although, if i remember correctly, this package _is downloadable, it was
> in a way deeply hidden in the internet (not in the usual places like
> smalltalkhub or squeaksource) as if the author did not really want it to be
> used by everybody for every task.

I never heard about this one.

Regards,
--
Serge Stinckwich
UCBN & UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC)
Help fight Ebola by joining the Computing for Ebola Challenge
http://bit.ly/1oEdBag

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werner kassens-2

Re: Julia vs Pharo

>I never heard about this one.

no wonder<g>, i got the name wrong, it was helvetia
werner

SergeStinckwich

Re: Julia vs Pharo

On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 5:01 PM, werner kassens <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>I never heard about this one.
>
> no wonder<g>, i got the name wrong, it was helvetia

Ok, this is about domain-specific languages not multiple dispatch.

--
Serge Stinckwich
UCBN & UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC)
Help fight Ebola by joining the Computing for Ebola Challenge
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werner kassens-2

Re: Julia vs Pharo

yes, but it is my recollection - and this recollection could very well be wrong - that you could separately define #aMethod: aVar (if aVar isNumber and aVar is>0) dosomething and #aMethod:aVar (if aVar isNumber) doSomethingElse and #aMethod:aVar (if avar isString) doAThirdThing, not with this nonsense syntax but with this functionability.
werner

On Monday, November 17, 2014 5:06:32 PM UTC+1, Serge Stinckwich wrote:

On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 5:01 PM, werner kassens <<a href="javascript:" target="_blank" gdf-obfuscated-mailto="H0g8yyMdA_4J" onmousedown="this.href='javascript:';return true;" onclick="this.href='javascript:';return true;">werne...@...> wrote:
>>I never heard about this one.
>
> no wonder<g>, i got the name wrong, it was helvetia

Ok, this is about domain-specific languages not multiple dispatch.

SergeStinckwich

Re: [smalltalk-research] Re: Julia vs Pharo

In reply to this post by SergeStinckwich

On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 8:13 PM, Lukas Renggli <[hidden email]> wrote:

>
> On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 5:05 PM, Serge Stinckwich
> <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 5:01 PM, werner kassens <[hidden email]>
>> wrote:
>> >>I never heard about this one.
>> >
>> > no wonder<g>, i got the name wrong, it was helvetia
>>
>> Ok, this is about domain-specific languages not multiple dispatch.
>
>
> It actually included an example of multiple dispatch :-)

Hi Lukas,

I was not aware of that ;-)
I will have a look.

Thanks,
--
Serge Stinckwich
UCBN & UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC)
Help fight Ebola by joining the Computing for Ebola Challenge
http://bit.ly/1oEdBag

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SergeStinckwich

Re: [smalltalk-research] Re: Julia vs Pharo

Were is the code located ?

Apparently the Helvetia one click image is no more available on this page:
http://scg.unibe.ch/research/helvetia

On Tue, Nov 18, 2014 at 4:38 PM, Serge Stinckwich
<[hidden email]> wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 8:13 PM, Lukas Renggli <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 5:05 PM, Serge Stinckwich
>> <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 5:01 PM, werner kassens <[hidden email]>
>>> wrote:
>>> >>I never heard about this one.
>>> >
>>> > no wonder<g>, i got the name wrong, it was helvetia
>>>
>>> Ok, this is about domain-specific languages not multiple dispatch.
>>
>>
>> It actually included an example of multiple dispatch :-)
>
> Hi Lukas,
>
> I was not aware of that ;-)
> I will have a look.
>
> Thanks,
> --
> Serge Stinckwich
> UCBN & UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC)
> Help fight Ebola by joining the Computing for Ebola Challenge
> http://bit.ly/1oEdBag

--
Serge Stinckwich
UCBN & UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC)
Help fight Ebola by joining the Computing for Ebola Challenge
http://bit.ly/1oEdBag

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