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This is an insightful and level-headed comment that applies equally to R. Although Julia is a growing alternative to Fortran/C/etc for long-running computation

This is an insightful and level-headed comment that applies equally to R. Although Julia is a growing alternative to Fortran/C/etc for long-running computations, it remains awkward and unpleasant for interactive analysis. Users familiar with Python/R/etc must weight the benefits of Julia against its slow library startup, its cryptic error messages, and its thin documentation. Also, the lack of a community repository for well-vetted Julia libraries can limit uptake by professional researchers who must be able to trust their tools. A real strength of R (in comparison not just to Julia but also to python) is that such a repository exists, and that it has automated testing across a range of computer architectures and versions of R, including not just unit testing within individual libraries, but also testing of related libraries.

disgruntledphd2 6y ago
Yeah, the R community owes a lot of it's stability to Uwe Ligges, and his (sometimes annoying) insistence on CRAN package quality.
BadInformatics 6y ago
> Julia is a growing alternative to Fortran/C/etc for long-running computations, it remains awkward and unpleasant for interactive analysis Did you mean to write short-running scripts? If anything, the Julia dev workflow is biased towards interactive analysis in a REPL a la R or IPython/Jupyter. I don't mean to imply that there's no startup overhead, but how often are you restarting the REPL when doing EDA? Unless it's more than once every few minutes (which is a very odd workflow), then startup overhead is effectively amortized. > A real strength of R (in comparison not just to Julia but also to python) is that such a repository exists CRAN is certainly a cut above many other package repos here, but I'm not sure "trust their tools" can apply to all packages on there. Anecdotally, I've had a lot of issues with compiled dependencies and missing/out of date external assets on less well-trodden packages. There's a reason MRAN, Conda and JuliaBinaryWrappers exist after all. For whatever reason, Julia package maintainers also seem more receptive to making their work compatible with other libraries as well. This goes beyond just multiple dispatch as well--imagine if tidyverse/non-tidyverse wasn't such a hard split.

disgruntledphd2 6y ago

Yeah, the R community owes a lot of it's stability to Uwe Ligges, and his (sometimes annoying) insistence on CRAN package quality.

BadInformatics 6y ago

> Julia is a growing alternative to Fortran/C/etc for long-running computations, it remains awkward and unpleasant for interactive analysis Did you mean to write short-running scripts? If anything, the Julia dev workflow is biased towards interactive analysis in a REPL a la R or IPython/Jupyter. I don't mean to imply that there's no startup overhead, but how often are you restarting the REPL when doing EDA? Unless it's more than once every few minutes (which is a very odd workflow), then startup overhead is effectively amortized. > A real strength of R (in comparison not just to Julia but also to python) is that such a repository exists CRAN is certainly a cut above many other package repos here, but I'm not sure "trust their tools" can apply to all packages on there. Anecdotally, I've had a lot of issues with compiled dependencies and missing/out of date external assets on less well-trodden packages. There's a reason MRAN, Conda and JuliaBinaryWrappers exist after all. For whatever reason, Julia package maintainers also seem more receptive to making their work compatible with other libraries as well. This goes beyond just multiple dispatch as well--imagine if tidyverse/non-tidyverse wasn't such a hard split.