jamesjporter

I wonder what this means for the future of OpenStack?

This sounds really cool; I'd love to see a blog post about it :)

We used to use gluster in production but had similar problems to raggiskula and are currently in the process of moving away from it.

This comment overstates the current power of Julia's parallel programming model — as of now Julia has no real tools for shared-memory parallelism and probably will not for another few versions or so. For distributed memory Julia is great, but please do not use Julia if you are being hindered by the GIL.

(NB I say this as a big Julia evangelist. it has a lot of potential but is not really there yet on a number of things, this being one of them.)

It's not a genetic algorithm, but FFTW's planning system actually does perform experiments to optimize for a particular machine's hardware.

I wish someone would try this again for Emacs :(

it's interesting how some software problems have garnered many really good solutions while others are still mired in stuff like this.

e.g. no matter what your preferred source control tool is I think we can all agree that there are some pretty good options out there these days. compare that to the insanity that prevails in packaging in every corner.

I think he might mean "shaking things up" (which Node certainly has done) rather than "taking over the world" (which, as you point out, it has not).

It's less a matter of ability and more a matter of having the time/motivation. If you took a bunch of practicing natural scientists and/or engineers and forced them somehow to enroll in a course teaching Scheme/Clojure/etc., would many of them do well? Almost certainly. If you gave them the choice between a Lisp and something like Julia or MATLAB to use in their everyday work when they need to do some computation? They'll probably choose the later because it's easy and familiar and doesn't have a huge up-front time investment; scientists tend to be very busy people.

I agree with collyw; Lisp is too much for most scientists, who just care about getting their research done and can't be bother to learn all this weird FP/paren stuff [1]. Supplying an obvious, familiar syntax that looks like math written on paper for, e.g., matrix operations, is critical. This is actually one of the core tensions in Julia development imho: balancing having a sane, well designed language (from a programmer's perspective) vs. having a tool that allows scientists to quickly and easily crank out results.

[1]: Note; I am not insinuating that Lisp is bad, I like it personally. Just relaying the response you will get from most practicing scientists who are not trained as programmers.

Us Emacs users unfortunately have to remap it to control to retain sanity on standard keyboards :P