path: root/2024/captions/emacsconf-2024-julia--exploring-shared-philosophies-in-julia-and-emacs--gabriele-bozzola--answers.vtt

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NOTE Q: Do you have any suggestions for interactive debugging of Julia code in Emacs?

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... answer to that. I, I think the infrastructure for an

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ecosystem in Julia in general is as mature as other

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languages, and even debugger infiltrator themselves are

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not particularly well developed. And so I don't think

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there's much we can do about that right now. I think that it's

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unfortunate that most of the development for these type of

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tools is tightly linked to VS code. But even there, I don't

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think that there's much done in terms of interactive

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debugging. So I, yeah, I think this has to be worked on mostly

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on the Julia side first. And then probably Emacs can get

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something out of that. I know that there's development in

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debugger.jl itself for future releases to make it at least

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faster and more stable. But yeah, I think we're not there as

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Julia community itself. So let alone Emacs, integration

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with Emacs. The way I personally debug is mostly using,

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well, debugger and infiltrator with Julia REPL mode in

NOTE Q: Can you call out something that Julia has that Emacs does not, and which could benefit Emacs?

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Emacs. The second question, can you call out something that

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Julia has that Emacs does not and which could benefit Emacs?

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Nothing stands out to me except the usual multi-threading

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and things like this. I don't necessarily see something

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that Julia has going on that DMX doesn't have, but I see some

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differences and approaches that I think are important,

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like the community. I think Julia is a very active and tight

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community. Julia uses Slack and is very, very active. I

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think he might say something like that, but it's maybe more

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on Reddit, IRC. JuliaCon is big and brings together lots and

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lots of people. And I think the sense of community is really

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powerful. It's very easy to essentially meet people that

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are interested in what we're building and interested in

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what we're doing and interested in Julian, our, you know,

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hacker spirit. I think Emacs is a very strong community.

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We're here on a Saturday talking about Emacs, which again

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proves that we are doing this. But I'd like to emphasize that

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the community is a really important aspect in Julia that I

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think we should double down on our side. The next question is

NOTE Q: Is there a way to use lisp syntax with Julia, like hy for python or lisp flavoured erlang?

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about Lisp syntax with Julia, like what we can do in Python.

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I don't think that's, I don't, I am not aware of any package

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that does that. I would bet that there's something there. I

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think that that's possible. Indeed, there used to be a Lisp

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interpreter in Julia itself until the latest release. The

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syntax parsing was done with a Lisp, it was called TemtoList

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indeed. I think this got rid, get rid of this for our more

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Julia-based solution that is faster and with better code

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provenance. I think that it should be possible to use the

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metaprogramming features in Julia to change the structure

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of your syntax to be a Lispy syntax. I do want to emphasize

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that Julia is heavily inspired by Lisp, so I wouldn't be

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surprised if if something like this were possible.

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I have tried Julia Snail.

NOTE Q: Have you tried the Julia Snail package for Emacs? It tries to be like SLY/SLIME for Common Lisp.

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So the next question is about Julia

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Snail. I found Julia REPL to be a little bit easier to set up

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and use. So I just settled on that. I should maybe revisit

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that. In particular, I use the Julia REPL with the vterm

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backend, which essentially makes a companion REPL to my

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scripts. And that works for me. I do think that the tooling

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uh, could be improved. I think there is definitely much room

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and I would like to see improvement in that area. Um, and, uh,

NOTE Q: Is there a data inspector for a Julia REPL available that you can use in Emacs?

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so we have data inspector for Julia REPL.

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I don't think so. I don't, is there any data inspector

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in for, for the Julia REPL that we can use in Emacs?

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I'm not sure. I don't think so.

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I think the way I look at data is

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essentially ignoring Emacs when encoded. It's just using the

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REPL. And again, with Julia REPL. So I'm not aware of any

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specialized tool And again, maybe this is, again, a good

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moment to emphasize that tooling, the Julia community

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clusters around VS Code. And there is tools like the, pretty

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much all the work with VS Code, unfortunately. And while

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there's a very, very decent Julia mode and Julia repo mode

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and Julia snail, there's definitely, definitely room for

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improvement.

NOTE Q: Have you tried literate programming Julia (using Org babel or some other means) in Emacs?

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Next, we have a question about literate programming in

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Julia. I haven't done much of it with Org Babel or

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anything else. I haven't done much of it. I can say that Julia

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has developed a new iteration of notebooks called Pluto.

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Here I'm thinking about Jupyter notebooks. The Pluto

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notebooks for Julia try to remove a bunch of the pain points

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that Jupyter notebooks have, meaning you cannot easily

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commit them to Git or things like this.

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I haven't used them, but I know some people are very fond of

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them. And so I think that that's what some of the Julia

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community would use for notebooks. And I think they can

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interact with Emacs with no problem. And that would be a form

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of later programming. But if you can do it in Python, you can

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do it in Julia. I think there is no reason. And actually, you

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can take advantage of all this just-in-time or

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just-out-of-time compilation by keeping the same

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session. So I think it will be definitely a nice use case. So

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these are the questions that I see here. I'm going to scroll

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through the comments and see if there's something that I

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should say about comments. I'm excited people want to learn

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Julia. I have to say that if I want to do GPU computing

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nowadays, I find it much easier to do it with Julia than with

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CUDA. So I encourage people to look into that. And I do,

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again, I would like to share what makes me excited about

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Emacs, about this being open, being collaborative, being

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respectable with documentation is something that I find in

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Julia. So I think people that are excited about the same

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features will find a little bit of joy in working with Julia.

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I think I addressed what I have here. I don't know if there's

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anything else that I should add.

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It took me a minute to unmute there.

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No, I think that was awesome. And thank you so much.

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I guess I thought it would

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collapse that shared area on BBB, my mistake, on the stream,

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or I would have left it open. But in any case, no, I thought

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that was great. You did a great job of responding to all the

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questions and comments. And thank you again so much for your

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talk and getting us all excited to learn Julia. Thank you.

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Enjoy EmacsConf. And again, thanks so much for attending,

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for being EmacsConf. Thank you.