Julia One Liners to Impress Your Friends

This was inspired by the blog post 10 Scala One Liners to Impress Your Friends.

1. Multiple Each Item in a List by 2

Original Scala version

(1 to 10) map { _ * 2 }

I think the Julia version is clearer. The x->2x notation for anonymous function looks very similar to regular mathematical notation.

map(x->2x, 1:10)

2. Sum a List of Numbers

Sums numbers from 1 to 1000 in Scala either by using reduceLeft or sum.

(1 to 1000).reduceLeft( _ + _ )
(1 to 1000).sum

Very similar in Julia, but the reduce seems more elegant in that you don’t have to explicitly give the arguments to +. reduce takes a binary operator. So you just pass that. You don’t have to tell Julia how to add numbers with it.

reduce(+, 1:1000)
sum(1:1000)

3. Verify if Exists in a String

Check if a word in a word list is present in a string.

val wordList = List("scala", "akka", "play framework", "sbt", "typesafe")
val tweet = "This is an example tweet talking about scala and sbt."
(wordList.foldLeft(false)( _ || tweet.contains(_) ))
wordList.exists(tweet.contains)

Here I really think the Scala version is rather cryptic. I cannot really guess how this works without learning more about Scala. In Julia:

wordlist = ["scala", "akka", "play framework", "sbt", "typesafe"]
tweet = "This is an example tweet talking about scala and sbt."
any(word->contains(tweet, word), wordlist)

4. Read in a File

This is a line for reading a file as a string in Scala. While that is apparently impressive by Java standards it is rather verbose for other languages.

val fileText = io.Source.fromFile("data.txt").mkString

In Julia this would just be

filetext = readstring(“data.txt”)`

There is another Scala example of reading the file and turning every line into an element in list.

val fileLines = io.Source.fromFile("data.txt").getLines.toList

This is also the sort of thing that is trivial in Julia. Julia’s file open command can take a function as an argument and provide that function with a stream object and then close the file after the function is finished. There are many functions like readstring, readlines etc which takes streams as arguments. So you can write:

filelines = open(readlines, "data.txt")

5. Happy Birthday to You!

Actually didn’t think Julia had foreach when I first made the example, so I am showing two versions now:

(1 to 4).map { i => "Happy Birthday " + (if (i == 3) "dear NAME" else "to You") }.foreach { println }

The Scala equivalent:

foreach(println, map(i->"Happy Birthday " * (i == 3 ? "dear NAME" : "to You"), 1:4))

In Julia it is clearer to do it in two steps:

lines = map(1:4) do i 
		"Happy Birthday " * 
		if i == 3 "dear NAME" else "to You" end 
end
print(join(lines, "\n"))

One thing to notice though is that you can write this stuff in Julia with a lot less clutter of parenthesis and curly braces. In Scala need 4 parenthesis for the if statement, while Julia avoids this and use a single end keyword instead.

6. Filter list of numbers

Partition a list of students into two categories.

val (passed, failed) = List(49, 58, 76, 82, 88, 90) partition ( _ > 60 )

There is no function like partition in Julia so you would have to write this using multiple lines:

grades = [49, 58, 76, 82, 88, 90]
passed = filter(grade->grade > 60, grades)
failed = filter(grade->grade <= 60, grades)

But of course nothing prevents us from defining a partition function in Julia:

function partition{T}(p, xs::Vector{T})
    as = T[]
    bs = T[]
    for x in xs
    	if p(x)
    	    push!(as, x)
    	else
    	    push!(bs, x)
    	end
    end
    (as, bs)
end

Which then would allow us to do like in Scala:

passed, failed = partition(grade->grade > 60, grades)

7. Fetch and Parse a XML web service

Here’s an example fetching the Twitter search feed in Scala.

val results = XML.load("http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?&q=scala")

I don’t know anything about XML stuff in Julia, so I will not attempt and alternative.

8. Find minimum (or maximum) in a List

Another couple of examples using reduceLeft to iterate through a list and apply a function. Added simpler examples of the method min/max on the list.

List(14, 35, -7, 46, 98).reduceLeft ( _ min _ )
List(14, 35, -7, 46, 98).min
List(14, 35, -7, 46, 98).reduceLeft ( _ max _ )
List(14, 35, -7, 46, 98).max

Again this is the sort of thing were Julia is very succinct.

reduce(min, [14, 35, -7, 46, 98])
min(14, 35, -7, 46, 98)
reduce(max, [14, 35, -7, 46, 98])
max(14, 35, -7, 46, 98)

9. Parallel Processing

The following one-liner would give you parallel processing over the list in Scala.

val result = dataList.par.map( line => processItem(line) )

This is not an area I am very familiar with in Julia, you can read more about parallel execution in Julia here. But here is a rough equivalent in Julia:

result = pmap(process_item, data_list)

Here is a concrete example of squaring all the numbers from 1 to 10:

pmap(x->x^2, 1:10)

10. Sieve of Eratosthenes

We got this crazy line from Scala, but no I am not going to figure out what this really does and rewrite it in Julia.

(n: Int) => (2 to n) |> (r => r.foldLeft(r.toSet)((ps, x) => if (ps(x)) ps -- (x * x to n by x) else ps))

If somebody can explain to me how this works, I’ll attempt to do it in Julia.