Julia IDE

[Terry Seaward]

I believe RStudio has been fantastic for the uptake of R, giving new users
an easy development environment. Has anyone considered something similar
for Julia? I'm aware of Forio's efforts, but there doesn't seem to be a
large community effort behind it - possibly because Forio is a commercial
entity?

Just curious.

- Terry

[Sven E Templer]

try
http://forio.com/julia/
best
s

Post by Terry Seaward
I believe RStudio has been fantastic for the uptake of R, giving new users
an easy development environment. Has anyone considered something similar
for Julia? I'm aware of Forio's efforts, but there doesn't seem to be a
large community effort behind it - possibly because Forio is a commercial
entity?
Just curious.
- Terry

[Tim Holy]

Post by Terry Seaward
I believe RStudio has been fantastic for the uptake of R, giving new users
an easy development environment. Has anyone considered something similar
for Julia? I'm aware of Forio's efforts, but there doesn't seem to be a
large community effort behind it - possibly because Forio is a commercial
entity?

I agree that having a powerful IDE will be very good for Julia's growth.
Given that Julia Studio is GPL3, the commercial nature of Forio doesn't seem
like a good reason not to contribute to their efforts. From my brief perusal,
to me it also seems like they've made a very sensible set of design decisions.

To me, the killer feature needed to make a compelling IDE is language support
for debugging---being able to set breakpoints, having errors optionally
trigger a debug mode, etc. Until that's in place, I suspect many of the nice
things about IDEs will not be realizable. Toivo's Debug package is extremely
well-done and immensely clever, and I use it quite frequently; however, for an
IDE it's pretty hard to deliver a satisfying experience if the debugger
requires source-level code modifications (especially if you have to rebuild
julia in order to have them take effect).

I suspect once julia has support for debugging and it's wired into Julia
Studio, the number of Studio's users (and likely contributors) will grow
quickly.

Best,
--Tim

[Viral Shah]

One issue with Julia Studio is that it is a fork of QTCreator. I believe
that Wes, Adam, and others had good reasons to do so.

Julia Studio also requires you to assign copyright back to Forio if you
want contributions to be included back in the main tree. Of course, nothing
stops anyone from forking Julia Studio itself. As far as I know, nobody has
cited this or the fact that Forio is a commercial entity as a reason for
not contributing. If anything, Forio has made a number of useful
contributions, and presented Julia in a number of conferences.

I think that the intersection of the set of people who develop and use
tools like julia for fun, and the set of people who hack IDEs for fun (fun
== open source) is too small. That is perhaps why very few efforts have
been made in this direction. This is perhaps also why RStudio was done by a
commercial entity, and so is Julia Studio.

-viral

Post by Terry Seaward

Post by Terry Seaward
I believe RStudio has been fantastic for the uptake of R, giving new

users

Post by Terry Seaward
an easy development environment. Has anyone considered something similar
for Julia? I'm aware of Forio's efforts, but there doesn't seem to be a
large community effort behind it - possibly because Forio is a

commercial

Post by Terry Seaward
entity?

I agree that having a powerful IDE will be very good for Julia's growth.
Given that Julia Studio is GPL3, the commercial nature of Forio doesn't seem
like a good reason not to contribute to their efforts. From my brief perusal,
to me it also seems like they've made a very sensible set of design decisions.
To me, the killer feature needed to make a compelling IDE is language support
for debugging---being able to set breakpoints, having errors optionally
trigger a debug mode, etc. Until that's in place, I suspect many of the nice
things about IDEs will not be realizable. Toivo's Debug package is extremely
well-done and immensely clever, and I use it quite frequently; however, for an
IDE it's pretty hard to deliver a satisfying experience if the debugger
requires source-level code modifications (especially if you have to rebuild
julia in order to have them take effect).
I suspect once julia has support for debugging and it's wired into Julia
Studio, the number of Studio's users (and likely contributors) will grow
quickly.
Best,
--Tim

[Terry Seaward]

Hi Tim, Viral,

Thanks for the replies.

I've also come across https://github.com/karbarcca/Sublime-Julia which
seems to work quite well. I'm not sure if there is actually a cost involved
in using Sublime Text 2. So far it's been free and version 2.0.2<http://www.sublimetext.com/2>has removed the expiry date.

As an aside, I wish I had the skill set to contribute to these (Julia
Studio/Sublime-Julia) efforts.

- Terry

Post by Viral Shah
One issue with Julia Studio is that it is a fork of QTCreator. I believe
that Wes, Adam, and others had good reasons to do so.
Julia Studio also requires you to assign copyright back to Forio if you
want contributions to be included back in the main tree. Of course, nothing
stops anyone from forking Julia Studio itself. As far as I know, nobody has
cited this or the fact that Forio is a commercial entity as a reason for
not contributing. If anything, Forio has made a number of useful
contributions, and presented Julia in a number of conferences.
I think that the intersection of the set of people who develop and use
tools like julia for fun, and the set of people who hack IDEs for fun (fun
== open source) is too small. That is perhaps why very few efforts have
been made in this direction. This is perhaps also why RStudio was done by a
commercial entity, and so is Julia Studio.
-viral

Post by Terry Seaward

Post by Terry Seaward
I believe RStudio has been fantastic for the uptake of R, giving new

users

Post by Terry Seaward
an easy development environment. Has anyone considered something

similar

Post by Terry Seaward
for Julia? I'm aware of Forio's efforts, but there doesn't seem to be a
large community effort behind it - possibly because Forio is a

commercial

Post by Terry Seaward
entity?

I agree that having a powerful IDE will be very good for Julia's growth.
Given that Julia Studio is GPL3, the commercial nature of Forio doesn't seem
like a good reason not to contribute to their efforts. From my brief perusal,
to me it also seems like they've made a very sensible set of design decisions.
To me, the killer feature needed to make a compelling IDE is language support
for debugging---being able to set breakpoints, having errors optionally
trigger a debug mode, etc. Until that's in place, I suspect many of the nice
things about IDEs will not be realizable. Toivo's Debug package is extremely
well-done and immensely clever, and I use it quite frequently; however, for an
IDE it's pretty hard to deliver a satisfying experience if the debugger
requires source-level code modifications (especially if you have to rebuild
julia in order to have them take effect).
I suspect once julia has support for debugging and it's wired into Julia
Studio, the number of Studio's users (and likely contributors) will grow
quickly.
Best,
--Tim

[mikeb2012]

Disagree on 'killer feature'.

Until recently, I was a very long time user/fan exclusively of Matlab.
Over a decade an a half ago, the one singular feature of the (then crappy
almost debug free) Matlab IDE had nothing to do with the IDE per se, it
boiled down to one line 'plot(x,y)' That was it, and that is still it for
me. As an engineer and researcher I have to be able to provide insights,
and visualizations are key to that. And the most frequent visualizations I
use are graphs, and not just dam 2-D plots but 3-D
scatterplots/surfaceplots/volumetric/etc.

When Julia *incorporates *decent plotting in to an IDE, *then *I predict it
will attract a lot of new users, especially newbies to Matlab-like
languages. And once you have a lot of newbs, then you'll get insight in to
what they want resulting in more new users, and a ground-swell of maturing
users. And the latter will *then *want awesome debugging as they become
more expert. And no, having the user separately load/use a plot package is
*not* a viable solution, it's a disincentive to newcomers.

To summarise: when I can download JuliaStudio (or any IDE) and blindly do
the following (as any raw newbie might) and not get an error, then Julia
will have 'arrived':

julia> x=[1,2,3];

3-element Int32 Array:

1

2

3


julia> y=[1,2,3];

3-element Int32 Array:

1

2

3


julia> plot(x,y)

plot not defined


Until then, Julia is just another language with an appealing (to me) syntax.

[Viral Shah]

This will come - we are not too far away. I doubt we will pick one graphics package as the default anytime soon, but there is some work in the pipeline to bundle julia and a bunch of packages together in an easy-to-download bundle. JuliaStudio could then be a bundle that includes Base, Graphics, JuliaStats, various optimization packages, etc.

-viral

Post by mikeb2012
Disagree on 'killer feature'.
Until recently, I was a very long time user/fan exclusively of Matlab. Over a decade an a half ago, the one singular feature of the (then crappy almost debug free) Matlab IDE had nothing to do with the IDE per se, it boiled down to one line 'plot(x,y)' That was it, and that is still it for me. As an engineer and researcher I have to be able to provide insights, and visualizations are key to that. And the most frequent visualizations I use are graphs, and not just dam 2-D plots but 3-D scatterplots/surfaceplots/volumetric/etc.
When Julia incorporates decent plotting in to an IDE, then I predict it will attract a lot of new users, especially newbies to Matlab-like languages. And once you have a lot of newbs, then you'll get insight in to what they want resulting in more new users, and a ground-swell of maturing users. And the latter will then want awesome debugging as they become more expert. And no, having the user separately load/use a plot package is not a viable solution, it's a disincentive to newcomers.
julia> x=[1,2,3];
1
2
3
julia> y=[1,2,3];
1
2
3
julia> plot(x,y)
plot not defined
Until then, Julia is just another language with an appealing (to me) syntax.

[Tim Holy]

Post by mikeb2012
Disagree on 'killer feature'.

I don't agree that we disagree :-).

I too think that plotting is a killer feature, more important than a debugger.
But I interpreted the topic as "why isn't there more focus on developing an
IDE?" To me the main point of an IDE is the debugger. You can have plotting
whether or not you have an IDE.

--Tim

Post by mikeb2012
Until recently, I was a very long time user/fan exclusively of Matlab.
Over a decade an a half ago, the one singular feature of the (then crappy
almost debug free) Matlab IDE had nothing to do with the IDE per se, it
boiled down to one line 'plot(x,y)' That was it, and that is still it for
me. As an engineer and researcher I have to be able to provide insights,
and visualizations are key to that. And the most frequent visualizations I
use are graphs, and not just dam 2-D plots but 3-D
scatterplots/surfaceplots/volumetric/etc.
When Julia *incorporates *decent plotting in to an IDE, *then *I predict it
will attract a lot of new users, especially newbies to Matlab-like
languages. And once you have a lot of newbs, then you'll get insight in to
what they want resulting in more new users, and a ground-swell of maturing
users. And the latter will *then *want awesome debugging as they become
more expert. And no, having the user separately load/use a plot package is
*not* a viable solution, it's a disincentive to newcomers.
To summarise: when I can download JuliaStudio (or any IDE) and blindly do
the following (as any raw newbie might) and not get an error, then Julia
julia> x=[1,2,3];
1
2
3
julia> y=[1,2,3];
1
2
3
julia> plot(x,y)
plot not defined
Until then, Julia is just another language with an appealing (to me) syntax.

[Miloslav Raus]

Hi everybody,

IMNSHO, the "best way" to incorporate plots into the IDE is not [just]
having to have them appear in a separate window, but the ability of the
repl to display "arbitrary" graphical [and hopefully interactive] objects
[or better yet, controls].

Let's make Julia the best smaltalk'o-lisp'o-python ever ;-)))))

Cheers

Post by mikeb2012
Disagree on 'killer feature'.
Until recently, I was a very long time user/fan exclusively of Matlab.
Over a decade an a half ago, the one singular feature of the (then crappy
almost debug free) Matlab IDE had nothing to do with the IDE per se, it
boiled down to one line 'plot(x,y)' That was it, and that is still it for
me. As an engineer and researcher I have to be able to provide insights,
and visualizations are key to that. And the most frequent visualizations I
use are graphs, and not just dam 2-D plots but 3-D
scatterplots/surfaceplots/volumetric/etc.
When Julia *incorporates *decent plotting in to an IDE, *then *I predict
it will attract a lot of new users, especially newbies to Matlab-like
languages. And once you have a lot of newbs, then you'll get insight in to
what they want resulting in more new users, and a ground-swell of maturing
users. And the latter will *then *want awesome debugging as they become
more expert. And no, having the user separately load/use a plot package is
*not* a viable solution, it's a disincentive to newcomers.
To summarise: when I can download JuliaStudio (or any IDE) and blindly do
the following (as any raw newbie might) and not get an error, then Julia
julia> x=[1,2,3];
1
2
3
julia> y=[1,2,3];
1
2
3
julia> plot(x,y)
plot not defined
Until then, Julia is just another language with an appealing (to me) syntax.

[Keith Campbell]

https://github.com/JuliaLang/Interact.jl

Post by Miloslav Raus
Hi everybody,
IMNSHO, the "best way" to incorporate plots into the IDE is not [just]
having to have them appear in a separate window, but the ability of the
repl to display "arbitrary" graphical [and hopefully interactive] objects
[or better yet, controls].
Let's make Julia the best smaltalk'o-lisp'o-python ever ;-)))))
Cheers

Post by mikeb2012
Disagree on 'killer feature'.
Until recently, I was a very long time user/fan exclusively of Matlab.
Over a decade an a half ago, the one singular feature of the (then crappy
almost debug free) Matlab IDE had nothing to do with the IDE per se, it
boiled down to one line 'plot(x,y)' That was it, and that is still it for
me. As an engineer and researcher I have to be able to provide insights,
and visualizations are key to that. And the most frequent visualizations I
use are graphs, and not just dam 2-D plots but 3-D
scatterplots/surfaceplots/volumetric/etc.
When Julia *incorporates *decent plotting in to an IDE, *then *I predict
it will attract a lot of new users, especially newbies to Matlab-like
languages. And once you have a lot of newbs, then you'll get insight in to
what they want resulting in more new users, and a ground-swell of maturing
users. And the latter will *then *want awesome debugging as they become
more expert. And no, having the user separately load/use a plot package is
*not* a viable solution, it's a disincentive to newcomers.
To summarise: when I can download JuliaStudio (or any IDE) and blindly do
the following (as any raw newbie might) and not get an error, then Julia
julia> x=[1,2,3];
1
2
3
julia> y=[1,2,3];
1
2
3
julia> plot(x,y)
plot not defined
Until then, Julia is just another language with an appealing (to me) syntax.

[Marcus Kriele]

When speaking about a Julia IDE, Juno (a plugin for LightTable by Mike
Innes) should be mentioned. It is already very usable and inherits the
"killer features" from LightTable. (
https://github.com/one-more-minute/Juno-LT). In addition you have in-line
plots (Gadfly), in-line documentation, and you can evaluate any line of
code anywhere in your program.