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Julia holds a lot of promise: the next 5 years will determine whether it can deliver on its quest to solve the two language problem. Over the past few weeks I'
by czep 8y ago
Julia holds a lot of promise: the next 5 years will determine whether it can deliver on its quest to solve the two language problem.
Over the past few weeks I've been evaluating Julia as a potential R replacement. IMO, it's definitely not there yet. I've run into bugs, crashes, hangs, sluggish performance, packages that won't load in 1.0, a clunky REPL, and a lot of code that I can't trust has been as well peer reviewed as what's in Base R. It'll take me a couple months but I plan to write a blog post on my experience, and I'm no Dan Luu ;)
That said I like the design of Julia, and the mission or promise as I call it could eventually make Julia an R replacement (as well as a replacement for lots of other languages). I started using R in 2001-ish, and at the time I remember thinking no way would I switch to R from SAS. Today I laugh at that, but that's the difference that 15 years will make. Julia is still very young. It's advantage is the modern design. R is entrenched and robust, but let's face it, it's design is ancient, rooted in the Fortran-and-card-punch era, and there are things (eg. multithreaded) it will never do.
Julia is at a crossroads: the core developers are eager to listen to the community. Whether the devs can maintain grasp of their vision while still delivering what the community wants is yet to be seen. They're being pulled in a thousand different directions, based on everyone's desire for what they want out of Julia. This could end up a disaster if the devs don't stick to their vision. Even though it's not good enough to replace R for my daily work right now, I plan to keep using Julia and contributing, because in 5, 10, 15 years, perhaps I will feel about R the way I feel about SAS today.
- siproprio 8y agoRecently, I tried to install JuliaPro on my computer, to play with it, see what it is about. I couldn't complete the installation, it gave a weird error "windows cannot find -v". Nothing came up on forums or the internet, so I gave up on trying to learn Julia.
- mkborregaard 8y agoAn important thing that many people fail to realise is that Julia-1.0 came as a surprise to package authors as well, and thus the first month of the the release has been a scramble to get everything working on 1.0. Unfortunately the pre-1.0 package manager did not have good facilities for upper bounding versions - so essentially everybody's packages would install on 1.0 but be broken. At exactly the same time, a lot of people thought "hey, 1.0 time to check out this new language", and would experience all those crashes. Doing a review of Julia based on the experience in the first month after 1.0 will be grossly misleading. I've used the language progressively more for the last 3 years, and also teach a university R course, so I have some experience to base that claim on.
- improbable22 8y agoYes, the package situation seemed much better 6 months ago, on v0.6. Because so much changed in v0.7, it would (IMHO) have made sense to release 1.0 alongside v0.7.1 or something. (But I guess there are various pressures, not to delay, too.)
- czep 8y ago> Doing a review of Julia based on the experience in the first month after 1.0 will be grossly misleading. This is definitely a fair point and a main reason I am not rushing to judgment after trying Julia for just a few weeks. I like the language already, and fully realize there is a lot of hard work going on among package maintainers to adjust to 1.0. My main advice to anyone trying Julia is to take the long view. It's still very young so look past the rough edges to its potential.