Oh, I would so love to see you succeed with the Amaran lights, which presumably would lead to all of the Aputure stuff being reverse engineered? I think if there was an open-source integration for them with say the Elgato Stream Deck or Home Assistant, it would be a major, major success story. For all those YouTube folks that do talking head at their desk this would be sooo much better than controlling them via an app on the phone.
It is worth pointing out that this blog post is old, from January. Julia 0.5 adds a phenomenal new feature, the dot syntax [1], that automatically fuses vectorized expressions. I believe that feature was added quite a while after this blog post was written.
Currently the dot syntax works for all functions, except for operators like .+, but in julia 0.6 it will work across the board. At that point, an expression like
A.*B.*C
will automatically be translated into the de-vectorized loop version that the author identifies as the fasted way to implement something like that, without the need for any macros or other special tricks.
I've been using julia for a little more than two years now. I've been subscribed to all the mailing lists and regularly read the github issues. Not all of them, but a fair share. I've never, ever seen any behavior by any of the core devs that one could even remotely describe as toxic, rude or anything like that. The community is actually really helpful and supportive.
I have seen this point about a toxic dev been made before in some blog post. Back then I followed the story up because it seemed so at odds with my experience with the core devs. It took a bit of googling and following links, but in the end, in my mind, there was simply nothing to the whole story. The supposedly rude behavior was not at all rude, imho.
I don't really know where these allegations come from, but I find this kind of "I've heard second hand that there is a toxic dev" inappropriate. If someone has a problem with someone, make it explicit, post the email that you dislike, so that others can judge themselves. But these vague accusations are not helpful, and at least from my point of view entirely at odds with how I have perceived the behavior of the core devs over the last two years.
I should say that I'm not part of the MIT crowd. I've never met or talked with any of the core devs and don't know them beyond reading their emails on mailing lists and sporadic interactions on github.
The rude behavior definitely exists, I can point out a number of examples if you send me your e-mail address (you can look me up, @ScottPJones on GitHub, easily enough). I've seen that that sort of disrespectful behavior tends to spread in the community, unfortunately, when nobody dares call out one person for their comments and actions, because of their position.
But then - as a bystander - let me mention that I once wondered about your insistent replies in some gh issue. God, can't he stop, I thought, and, wow, they have patience. Fortunately such a situation is rare and I'm very often impressed by the intelligent friendly conversations I see. A lot to learn.
Yes, a year ago I'd never worked on any open source project, didn't use GitHub, Google Groups, Twitter, StackOverflow, or any of the other programmer social media sites, and was a total newbie about Julia, using git, and dealing with an open source community. Since I had convinced the other people at the startup where I am working that using Julia would be better for us than a mashup of Python, C, C++14, R or Octave, when I started encountering serious bugs and performance problems in areas that were critical to our development, I did get very insistent, esp. where I had lots of previous experience in the area. Instead of simply complaining about the problems, I submitted issues, wrote documentation, made PRs to fix the issues (in the Scheme parser code, in the core C code, in the C Unicode handling module, esp. to the string handling code in Base, and helped improve the coverage by adding a lot of unit tests). It was a major learning process for me, learning best practices for how to break apart a PR into smaller chunks (even though accepting huge PRs from other developers happens all the time), trying to focus on single issues in a PR, and trying to improve my own communications skills on social media. Between the time I started until early September when v0.4 was released, I'd even reached the point of being the #6 contributor to JuliaLang/julia (#26 all time out of some >400 contributors), so I don't think anybody could possibly accuse me of not having putting my time and effort where my mouth was, as far as fixing problems I encountered. Having gotten the critical issues fixed and into v0.4, so we had a reasonably stable base for our product, I was able to concentrate wholly on our product, and so stopped being so pushy about getting things fixed. ;) I still think there are some real systemic problems that need to be addressed, in how things are done, and hopefully some time will be spent to deal with that at this summer's JuliaCon 2016.
Thank you for this reply, I also wish you luck with your project, joy at the JuliaCon and I'm glad that 0.4 worked :-)
Maybe a source of discontent is that startups are using Julia 'for real' and are under pressure to deliver. On the other side Julia is still developing. Core devs work feverishly but some issues just need 'time to brew'. Quiet thinking/coding alone or in small circles.
IIRC on a video of Alan Edelman he ~ said that he was involved in HPC for 30 years and to this day they weren't that successful and don't know how to do it. Julia is trying to do it in a completely different way. - Considering 30 years, does it matter if Julia takes 'her' time to be crowned?
You know, I read some of the harsh comments you got from people, and they may have been right to say these things, I don't know. But kudos for taking it in stride and maintaining a positive attitude. Good luck in your projects.
Thanks. I've never had any problems with constructive criticism, no matter how harsh it might seem (often that is where you learn the most). The problem is when people make disrespectful, disparaging, insulting remarks (which is against both the NumFocus & Julia community standards), and nothing is done about it, which has ended up driving away several people already. Hopefully that can be addressed.
I followed your interactions with the core devs, at least the public ones. I think the core devs handled the situation with an enormous amount of patience and tact.
Why, oh why is there no version with 3G/LTE? That is by far the biggest bummer, imho. For people that are on the road a lot that makes such a difference, and pretty much all other tablets offer that option, so it seems really lame to not have that. Also, if I spent $1800 for a Surface Pro in the best configuration, I really would expect it to have the same connectivity as a iPad mini... Other than that, this seems like the perfect device (the Pro version).
There isn't a great story for dropping one more device - the phone. And that story is quite unlikely since you wouldn't want to carry your tablet with you on a night out, etc. I could see myself using this and dropping my phone if I never did things like out of band experiences. I'd eventually have enough situations per year where I wanted my phone, not my tablet, that I'd end up with a phone - but maybe I'd live with a 3-5 year old phone for that...
The wife would not like to see the tablet around 100% of the time since, with LTE, it'd be a physical extension more than PC's and the phone are now.
Well, sure, for a consumer device that I use on my couch in the evenings, I certainly don't need LTE. But the Pro seems pretty geared towards business, right? For business travelers this makes a huge, huge difference, though. And it seems to me that the high end Pro version is probably exclusively targeted at business users, at its price.
The top edition already is $1700, the cost of adding LTE must be a pretty small fraction of total cost at that point.
For business people your arguments 2 and 3 are actually incorrect: I don't want to use my personal data plan for my work. If the device has its separate LTE, it can just all go to my company and I'm done with the costs.
I actually think 3g on tablets is rather silly now. With basically all mobile phones having the ability to share internet, why do you need to pay additional money for another mobile plan...
Earlier releases emphasized NumPy/SciPy for IronPython. Is that effort dead? There were major holes, like no support for matplotlib, and I had kind of hoped that these would be filled over time, but now it looks as if the whole thing is moving into other directions?
David, our group funded that effort (development by Enthought) and the code is still out there and mostly functional, but it really never got traction. The 1st phase involved major surgery on the NumPy/SciPy libraries which they needed anyway, so some good came out of it. We'd love to see some kind volunteers finish the remaining "10" percent. It would be very useful to other .Net users as well... yeah, I shed a tear :(.
Apple sells a lot more WiFi iPads than it does 3G iPads. Best data I could find on a quick google is admittedly almsot a year old, but:
90% of the tablets use WiFi only (some have inactivated cellular chipset) meaning that only 10% of the tablets (as of Q4 2011) were cellular activated. Operators who start to bundle multiple devices by single data plans and data buckets are going to see a better yield in this category. We expect family data plans to be introduced in the US market soon.
I don't mind this so much presuming it can do Bluetooth tethering with my phone [vs WiFi due to power usage issues]. If I'm the device's user, I'll likely have my phone with me, so having a redundant radio in the device doesn't add value. And, if I let someone else use the device while I'm not around, the likelihood is that there will be an available WiFi source.
I'd like it-just-works connectivity between my phone and any other devices I carry with me. Right now, I have to hit a couple buttons on both devices -- a pain for short-term usage scenarios.
I can get tethering to work, my mom: never. My parents both got iPads and a device that isn't just online all the time could never ever work for them. iPad really set the bar on that one.
Yeah. Tethering still is too mysterious. If it's not working, which device is at fault? For awhile (pre-ICS), my Droid RAZR had a bug where it required a reboot before the hotspot would work. Of course, it failed silently and claimed to be making itself available!
The thing about it-just-works connectivity is that it will generally halve battery life on a smartphone. You basically have to keep the radios constantly on and scanning for known connections.
I know little about Bluetooth 4 except that it's supposed to be low power. Could it be used to "scan" for interested/allowed devices and then "step-up" to a higher power, higher bandwidth connection?
