I actually think Julia's behaviour (partially) copied from matlab is bad. I had to review a lot of matlab/Julia simulation code write by PhD/grad students (as well as my own) and most of the time when things somehow are not working debugging becomes a task of "find the missing dot". If they would have decided on a more obvious symbol (the dot is really just way too easy to overlook) for broadcasting it would be much better, but I still much prefer that broadcast and matrix operation would use entirely different operators/named functions. Instead we have the case that a little annotation can dramatically change the behaviour of the code (the matrix exponential is in fact a great example).
That said I mainly work with fields and calculus so I might be biased because the majority of operations are broadcast and I only rarely use matrix operations.
The nice thing is that if this dot-approach (or some other syntax with a similar effect) were implemented in Futhark, then because Futhark is statically-typed, all mismatches would be compile-time errors. Those are very hard to overlook :)
I don't think that's generally the case, AFAIK the example of the matrix exponential example a bit further up would not be really distinguishable as a type from a regular matrix (with exponential elements).
> most of the time when things somehow are not working debugging becomes a task of "find the missing dot". If they would have decided on a more obvious symbo
I guess you could use your editor’s highlight-regexp function to make the dots more obvious during debugging :)
I personally like the dots because they’re so unintrusive, but I work in a field where most operations are matrix operations, so perhaps you’re right…
That said I mainly work with fields and calculus so I might be biased because the majority of operations are broadcast and I only rarely use matrix operations.