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I remember plenty of cases I got simply from observing the Julia repo for a few months, I could list them if you like... But I've been told by Julia contributor

I remember plenty of cases I got simply from observing the Julia repo for a few months, I could list them if you like... But I've been told by Julia contributors before that discussing this on HN is not an appropriate place. So we can discuss it, where I start linking to public examples on HN, or you can ignore my opinion on a problematic community and we can not discuss it. As to the code standards, my problem isn't with the CONTRIBUTING.md; that seems fine. It's how people make long term suggestions about fixing lasting problems. As an example people who suggest refactoring large sections of Julia's expansive base library (1600 symbols? a problem that causes parts of the slow startup time and memory usage) into other libraries (which would improve batteries included, etc. features) are summarily ignored / shouted down / (predicated on my previous paragraph) banned. Important improvements to the language go in circles (often on JULEP tagged issues) especially any large improvement that would require multiple people and lots of dev work and seem to gain little traction unless a core dev just takes the time to just do it; rather than a timeline to reach consensus and then design a plan for implementing it. As smaller examples. There was a push to increase test coverage and then months later commits plummeted the code coverage numbers and no one seemed to care. Sections of important code are uncommented, undocumented, and (mostly) untested on purpose. There are modularity problems and software architecture limitations inherent in the language design that go unaddressed. Unpredictable un-typed exceptions, namespaces/modules being hard to use for non-trivial designs, "interfaces" that aren't really. And these are just the ones without serious work behind them I can remember off the top of my head (the debugger and threading I acknowledge being worked on seriously). Though things being worked on seriously suffer problems as I mentioned earlier. Issues like these cause many of the original poster's problems. Julia is a great language, but the community seems unable to take the steps it needs to to actually make a "Tier 1" general purpose language (e.g. like python, go, clojure etc.). Setup a serious set of policies regarding language proposals; setup a transparent community policy and actually follow it; acknowledge that certain development idiosyncrasies aren't going to fly anymore; take software architecture concerns seriously; remove the toxic core language dev (that to my count has cost you at least 4 serious contributors if not more). Julia is likely "slowing down" relative to the expected development (which many people have observed) likely (by my thinking) because it is failing to attract/retain the developers it should be as a promising language (in my opinion) because of it's poor development and community standards. But hey, these are just my suggestions, I don't have any skin in this game. I just wish Julia was as good as it promised to be, and I'm a bit bitter it isn't for human, rather than technological or financial, reasons. Edit: Sorry I expanded, it felt unfair to not be more complete about it.

KenoFischer 10y ago
> I remember plenty of cases I got simply from observing the Julia repo for a few months, I could list them if you like... But I've been told by Julia contributors before that discussing this on HN is not an appropriate place. So we can discuss it, where I start linking to public examples on HN, or you can ignore my opinion and we can not discuss it. I do think HN is not the right forum to link to individual comments and call out people for their behavior. Perfectly happy to discuss the technical issues though. If you would would still like to discuss, or at least bring such instances to my attention, please do feel free to send me an email. > People who suggest refactoring large sections of Julia's expansive base library (1600 symbols? a problem that causes parts of the slow startup time and memory usage) into other libraries (which would improve batteries included, etc. features) are summarily ignored / shouted down / (predicated on my previous paragraph) banned. There are several recent examples where people have suggested such things, e.g. They were neither ignored nor shouted down nor banned. https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/16357 https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/16357 https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/16070 https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/16070 > Important improvements to the language go in circles on JULEP tagged issues namely any large improvement that would require multiple people and lots of dev work seems to gain little traction unless a core dev just takes the time to do it; rather than a timeline to reach consensus and then design a plan for implementing it. I don't understand what exactly the criticism is. At first I thought it was about, too much dicussion, but then it seemed to be about too little dev time, please do clarify. > There was a push to increase test coverage and then a few months later commits plummeted the code coverage numbers and no one seemed to care. I'm not really sure which instance you're referring to, but last time there was a major drop in coverage, it was investigated, found to be a bug in the instrumentation (which was fixed). I don't really think it's fair to say that people don't care. There's somewhat of a tooling problem here, since we can't run the coverage tests on travis, so we don't get them integrated in the GitHub UI, but people do look at them and add tests as appropriate. > Sections of important code are uncommented, undocumented, and untested on purpose. Yes, there are undocumented and uncommented sections in the code base, but I wouldn't say that they are so on purpose. I do admit to having added such hacks in the past (and not documented them because they were gonna go away soon after), because I needed them in outside packages, but people don't let me do that anymore ;). > Unpredictable un-typed exceptions, namespaces/modules being hard to use for non-trivial designs, interfaces without any sort of type enhancement. These are fair points, which I'm sure you've seen the issues about. The problem is the availability of developer time, not some sort of unwillingness to fix problems. Putting together the road map of what goes into each release and prioritizing are very hard, because there's just so much that could be worked on. > setup a transparent community policy and actually follow it; This is being discussed (as part of larger discussions around community governance) and as I mentioned will likely be a topic at JuliaCon.

KenoFischer 10y ago

> I remember plenty of cases I got simply from observing the Julia repo for a few months, I could list them if you like... But I've been told by Julia contributors before that discussing this on HN is not an appropriate place. So we can discuss it, where I start linking to public examples on HN, or you can ignore my opinion and we can not discuss it. I do think HN is not the right forum to link to individual comments and call out people for their behavior. Perfectly happy to discuss the technical issues though. If you would would still like to discuss, or at least bring such instances to my attention, please do feel free to send me an email. > People who suggest refactoring large sections of Julia's expansive base library (1600 symbols? a problem that causes parts of the slow startup time and memory usage) into other libraries (which would improve batteries included, etc. features) are summarily ignored / shouted down / (predicated on my previous paragraph) banned. There are several recent examples where people have suggested such things, e.g. They were neither ignored nor shouted down nor banned. https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/16357 https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/16357 https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/16070 https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/16070 > Important improvements to the language go in circles on JULEP tagged issues namely any large improvement that would require multiple people and lots of dev work seems to gain little traction unless a core dev just takes the time to do it; rather than a timeline to reach consensus and then design a plan for implementing it. I don't understand what exactly the criticism is. At first I thought it was about, too much dicussion, but then it seemed to be about too little dev time, please do clarify. > There was a push to increase test coverage and then a few months later commits plummeted the code coverage numbers and no one seemed to care. I'm not really sure which instance you're referring to, but last time there was a major drop in coverage, it was investigated, found to be a bug in the instrumentation (which was fixed). I don't really think it's fair to say that people don't care. There's somewhat of a tooling problem here, since we can't run the coverage tests on travis, so we don't get them integrated in the GitHub UI, but people do look at them and add tests as appropriate. > Sections of important code are uncommented, undocumented, and untested on purpose. Yes, there are undocumented and uncommented sections in the code base, but I wouldn't say that they are so on purpose. I do admit to having added such hacks in the past (and not documented them because they were gonna go away soon after), because I needed them in outside packages, but people don't let me do that anymore ;). > Unpredictable un-typed exceptions, namespaces/modules being hard to use for non-trivial designs, interfaces without any sort of type enhancement. These are fair points, which I'm sure you've seen the issues about. The problem is the availability of developer time, not some sort of unwillingness to fix problems. Putting together the road map of what goes into each release and prioritizing are very hard, because there's just so much that could be worked on. > setup a transparent community policy and actually follow it; This is being discussed (as part of larger discussions around community governance) and as I mentioned will likely be a topic at JuliaCon.