An introduction to the Julia language, part 1

1. They copied the most infuriating bits of matlab. The 1 vs 0 indexing is maybe a might annoyance, but the stupid use of the "." and " ' " to denote element-wise and transpose is horrible. My numeric programming is to the largest degree not linear algebra, so I mostly want element-wise operations. I can live with the fact that they defaulted to matrices instead of arrays by default (although I would argue they should actually call it properly), however using the '.' is just horrible. When I was still using matlab, I don't know how many hours I was debugging code where it ended up being "search the missing ." They are way too easy to overlook in regular editors but often don't cause your code to crash, but simply give non-sensible results (often not easy to deduce what went wrong). Similarly for the ' as the transpose operator, again a symbol that is way to easy to overlook, but will often not cause a crash but simple wrong results. I see the same errors with the students I supervise who are still using matlab (I know I am doing my best to convert them to use a proper language). This really is a significant development cost.

2. When I tried it a couple of years ago the recommendation for getting the best speed was to unwrap vector operations into loops. Hopefully they fixed that by now, because the reason whey I use a high-level programming language is because I don't want to do explicit loops for multiplying to arrays.