[Cython] Julialang

[Greg Ewing]

Dag Sverre Seljebotn wrote:

> I'm excited about Julia because it's basically what I'd *like* to 
> program in. My current mode of development for much stuff is Jinja2 or 
> Tempita used for generating C code; Julia would be a real step forward.

It looks interesting, but I have a few reservations about
it as it stands:

* No modules, just one big global namespace. This makes it
unsuitable for large projects, IMO.

* Multiple dispatch... I have mixed feelings about it. When
methods belong to classes, the class serves as a namespace,
and as we all know, namespaces are a honking great idea.
Putting methods outside of classes throws away one kind of
namespace.

* One-based indexing? Yuck. I suppose it's what Fortran and
Matlab users are familiar with, but it's not the best
technical decision, IMO.

On the plus side, it does seem to have a very nice and
unobtrusive type system.

> the next natural step is to implement Python in 
> Julia, with CPython C-API compatability. Which would be great.

That would indeed be an interesting thing to explore.

-- 
Greg