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Julia always was one of the languages I wondered whether I should have a closer look at (do python data-science stuff mostly, so it is an interesting project).

Julia always was one of the languages I wondered whether I should have a closer look at (do python data-science stuff mostly, so it is an interesting project). However, reading Dan Luu writing about his experiences with members of the Julia community https://danluu.com/julialang/ https://danluu.com/julialang/ I try my best to not get anywhere near it. Directly cited: Update: this post was edited a bit to remove a sentence about how friendly the Julia community is since that no longer seemed appropriate in light of recent private and semi-private communications from one of the co-creators of Julia. They were, by far, the nastiest and most dishonest responses I've ever gotten to any blog post. Some of those responses were on a private discussion channel; multiple people later talked to me about how shocked they were at the sheer meanness and dishonesty of the responses. Oh, and there's also the public mailing list. The responses there weren't in the same league, but even so, I didn't stick around long since I unsubscribed when one the Julia co-creators responded with something bad enough that it prompted someone else to to suggest sticking to the facts and avoiding attacks. That wasn't the first attack, or even the first one to prompt someone to respond and ask that people stay on topic; it just happened to be the one that made me think that we weren't going to have a productive discussion. I extended an olive branch before leaving, but who knows what happened there? Update 2, 1 year later: The same person who previously attacked me in private is now posting heavily edited and misleading excerpts in an attempt to discredit this post. I'm not going to post the full content in part because it's extremely long, but mostly because it's a gross violation of that community's norms to post internal content publicly. If you know anyone in the RC community who was there for the discussion before the edits and you want the truth, ask your RC buddy for their take. If you don't know any RC folks, consider that my debate partner's behavior was so egregious that multiple people asked him to stop, and many more people messaged me privately to talk about how inappropriate his behavior was. If you compare that to what's been publicly dredged up, you can get an idea of both how representative the public excerpts are and of how honest the other person is being._

hellofunk 8y ago
I've seen that post as well, and often wondered if it was fair characterization of overall Julia community (maybe it is), or is the result of a single bad apple at the top that overshadowed an otherwise pleasant community. Unfortunately, it doesn't take much negative energy to spoil a community, even if it comes from just one person. That it was a language co-creator is troubling but not necessarily a reason to avoid the language if the rest of the community is nice (which maybe it is, maybe it isn't). However one thing I have noticed is that most language communities do tend to follow an attitude set by the language creator(s). This seems to have played out quite a bit for Clojure, Python, Elm, Elixir, and other languages where, at least to me, the overall shared perspective of the community is closely aligned to the personal attitudes and opinions of the language author(s).
- ssfrr 8y ago
  Hopefully I can clarify some of the "maybe it is, maybe it isn't" in this post - I've found the Julia community to be almost universally full of helpful and friendly folks, mostly scientists and/or people with a language nerd bent. I'm not sure if there's a fair way to quantify drama in a community, but it hasn't been a big issue for me relative to all the positive interactions I've had with other julians.
- ScottPJones 8y ago
  I don't feel at all that it's a fair characterization of the overall community. I'm sure I've been the target of more of what Dan Luu experienced than anyone else in the Julia community, from the same source, but I haven't let that stop me from contributing as best I can to the community, by answering questions (on Gitter and Discourse), helping with code, and by contributing my own packages to help out in areas where I felt Julia needed some extra attention. I also think that most of the community is more aligned with the example set by Jeff and Viral. Both show great civility, patience, and a willingness to listen to others, in my experience. Finally, with regards to the person that both Dan and I have had problems with (and I have no personal knowledge of that feud, that happened before I had discovered Julia), I respect him a lot (even if he feels I "attack" him when I try to bring up technical issues with code / designs that he's been involved with), I will always be grateful for his role in creating Julia, I think he's a great promoter of Julia, at conferences, etc., and he often has quite a lot of good, well-thought out things to say on GitHub and Discourse.
montalbano 8y ago
Without taking a side here (and declaring for the sake of openness that I use Julia regularly and it is very helpful for the scientific work I do), I think it is worth noting that this was from 2014 (the language has moved forward greatly since then) and the inappropriately negative response described seems to be from 1 developer and not representative of the team. Edit: To add, Julia is now my go-to language for any scientific/numeric programming and would be my number 1 suggestion to anyone else doing similar work.
johnmyleswhite 8y ago
As a person who knows both of the people involved in that debacle, I think it's fair to say that there's a lasting interpersonal conflict between two specific people (one of whom is the author of the post you've linked to) that's been framed as a community-wide issue.
cormullion 8y ago
I thinking quoting from just one side of the argument is unfair, particularly if you’re drawing conclusions.
eigenspace 8y ago
For what it's worth, I got involved in the Julia community about a year ago and people have been nothing but friendly to me and toleant of my sometimes excessively dumb questions. I don't doubt that some people have gotten into nasty disputes but as far as I can tell, that seems to be pretty far from the norm.

hellofunk 8y ago

I've seen that post as well, and often wondered if it was fair characterization of overall Julia community (maybe it is), or is the result of a single bad apple at the top that overshadowed an otherwise pleasant community. Unfortunately, it doesn't take much negative energy to spoil a community, even if it comes from just one person. That it was a language co-creator is troubling but not necessarily a reason to avoid the language if the rest of the community is nice (which maybe it is, maybe it isn't). However one thing I have noticed is that most language communities do tend to follow an attitude set by the language creator(s). This seems to have played out quite a bit for Clojure, Python, Elm, Elixir, and other languages where, at least to me, the overall shared perspective of the community is closely aligned to the personal attitudes and opinions of the language author(s).

ssfrr 8y ago
Hopefully I can clarify some of the "maybe it is, maybe it isn't" in this post - I've found the Julia community to be almost universally full of helpful and friendly folks, mostly scientists and/or people with a language nerd bent. I'm not sure if there's a fair way to quantify drama in a community, but it hasn't been a big issue for me relative to all the positive interactions I've had with other julians.
ScottPJones 8y ago
I don't feel at all that it's a fair characterization of the overall community. I'm sure I've been the target of more of what Dan Luu experienced than anyone else in the Julia community, from the same source, but I haven't let that stop me from contributing as best I can to the community, by answering questions (on Gitter and Discourse), helping with code, and by contributing my own packages to help out in areas where I felt Julia needed some extra attention. I also think that most of the community is more aligned with the example set by Jeff and Viral. Both show great civility, patience, and a willingness to listen to others, in my experience. Finally, with regards to the person that both Dan and I have had problems with (and I have no personal knowledge of that feud, that happened before I had discovered Julia), I respect him a lot (even if he feels I "attack" him when I try to bring up technical issues with code / designs that he's been involved with), I will always be grateful for his role in creating Julia, I think he's a great promoter of Julia, at conferences, etc., and he often has quite a lot of good, well-thought out things to say on GitHub and Discourse.

montalbano 8y ago

Without taking a side here (and declaring for the sake of openness that I use Julia regularly and it is very helpful for the scientific work I do), I think it is worth noting that this was from 2014 (the language has moved forward greatly since then) and the inappropriately negative response described seems to be from 1 developer and not representative of the team. Edit: To add, Julia is now my go-to language for any scientific/numeric programming and would be my number 1 suggestion to anyone else doing similar work.

johnmyleswhite 8y ago

As a person who knows both of the people involved in that debacle, I think it's fair to say that there's a lasting interpersonal conflict between two specific people (one of whom is the author of the post you've linked to) that's been framed as a community-wide issue.

cormullion 8y ago

I thinking quoting from just one side of the argument is unfair, particularly if you’re drawing conclusions.

eigenspace 8y ago

For what it's worth, I got involved in the Julia community about a year ago and people have been nothing but friendly to me and toleant of my sometimes excessively dumb questions. I don't doubt that some people have gotten into nasty disputes but as far as I can tell, that seems to be pretty far from the norm.