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function julia_blues(bummers...) I largely agree, Julia is such a cool language and had so much potential. It definitely surprised me when they went with Swift

function julia_blues(bummers...) I largely agree, Julia is such a cool language and had so much potential. It definitely surprised me when they went with Swift instead, but realizing that Chris Lattner worked at Google at the time explained a lot. Unfortunately, every time I try to get into Julia, it just feels awkward coming from Python and a bit like stepping back in time. The stupidest, (stupidest in the sense that I really wish they didn't bother me, because they're silly things!), things that bother me are: 1. The 'end' keyword. It's everywhere! Loops, if-else statements, function bodies. I mean I understand why it's helpful for parsing and providing more info to the compiler, but honestly, I would've rather we just stuck with curly braces '{}'! At least it's fewer characters to type and it just feels less crowded on screen while reading. It feels like such a petty complaint, but honestly, it feels like I'm writing Pascal or Matlab all over again. Which leads me to my second point. 2. The default choice of 1 based indexing. I'm not going to go into it, because plenty of people before me have beat this dead horse already[1][2][3], but I can't help but be saddened by this choice and its implications. It's important to acknowledge the fact that Julia started as a competitor to Matlab and Octav, so it makes sense from that perspective. However, it could have been a much more general purpose language, with huge performance benefits over popular interpreted languages like Python, JS, and Ruby. It could have been a unifying force in the scientific computing community, bridging the gap between R and Python users with a greenfield approach that would have been a force to be reckoned with. Instead, rightly or not, it's viewed largely as 'just' a matlab replacement. Now, regardless of whether 1 or 0 based indexing is truly 'better' or the 'end' keyword is no big deal, the reality is that there's a huge demographic of potential users that won't buy into Julia, because it doesn't quite feel as ergonomic as Python/JS/Ruby and won't take it seriously as a general purpose language, because it looks/feels like Matlab and they only use 'real' programming languages. Again, I'm not saying this is right, but it is the reality we're faced with and it just feels like a huge missed opportunity and bums me out. end 1. https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/16260#issuecomment-217717018 https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/16260#issuecomment-2... 2. https://groups.google.com/g/julia-dev/c/tNN72FnYbYQ?pli=1 https://groups.google.com/g/julia-dev/c/tNN72FnYbYQ?pli=1 3. https://github.com/julialang/julia/issues/558 https://github.com/julialang/julia/issues/558

skohan 6y ago
Language aesthetics do matter. Broadly it seems like we've accepted that "c like" syntax - including brace-delimited blocks and zero-based indexing - should be the norm for programming languages. Any language which goes in a different direction should have a very strong reason to do so, because any deviation will be an obstacle for adoption. I share your frustration with the `end` keyword - it's just needlessly verbose, and for something used so frequently it makes sense to be as terse as possible. I have some similar quibbles with Rust syntax: I know it's a minor issue, but I'm really disappointed that snake_case was adopted. It's just ergonomically inferior to camelCase in every measure. It's one more character to type for every word, and on top of that, on a US keyboard, the underscore character is a pinky key way far away from the center of the keyboard. Making this one of the most frequently typed characters in the language makes no sense.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  snake_case is a lot more readable than CamelCase, which is a huge benefit ergonomically. The keyboard layout is no big deal, one can easily change it or use shortcut-based autocomplete. Rust does use CamelCase for type identifiers, trait identifiers and enum constructors, and the contrast with snake_case also aids readability.
  - skohan 6y ago
    I disagree that it's "a lot" more readable. I have read a lot of camelCase code in my lifetime, and I can count on zero hands the number of times I ever had an issue parsing code due to the use of camelCase. Keyboard remapping seems like an extreme solution, and I don't want to train my fingers in such a way that when I sit down at a different workstation that doesn't have my .vimrc I can't type rust anymore. You don't need snake_case for contrast. You can use lowerCamel and UpperCamel to denote the same levels of significance. SCREAMING_SNAKE is fine for constants because they don't get used all that often, but rust maps the hardest-to-type case to the most-frequently-used, which in my opinion is an ergonomic failure.
    - 6y ago

skohan 6y ago

Language aesthetics do matter. Broadly it seems like we've accepted that "c like" syntax - including brace-delimited blocks and zero-based indexing - should be the norm for programming languages. Any language which goes in a different direction should have a very strong reason to do so, because any deviation will be an obstacle for adoption. I share your frustration with the `end` keyword - it's just needlessly verbose, and for something used so frequently it makes sense to be as terse as possible. I have some similar quibbles with Rust syntax: I know it's a minor issue, but I'm really disappointed that snake_case was adopted. It's just ergonomically inferior to camelCase in every measure. It's one more character to type for every word, and on top of that, on a US keyboard, the underscore character is a pinky key way far away from the center of the keyboard. Making this one of the most frequently typed characters in the language makes no sense.

zozbot234 6y ago
snake_case is a lot more readable than CamelCase, which is a huge benefit ergonomically. The keyboard layout is no big deal, one can easily change it or use shortcut-based autocomplete. Rust does use CamelCase for type identifiers, trait identifiers and enum constructors, and the contrast with snake_case also aids readability.
- skohan 6y ago
  I disagree that it's "a lot" more readable. I have read a lot of camelCase code in my lifetime, and I can count on zero hands the number of times I ever had an issue parsing code due to the use of camelCase. Keyboard remapping seems like an extreme solution, and I don't want to train my fingers in such a way that when I sit down at a different workstation that doesn't have my .vimrc I can't type rust anymore. You don't need snake_case for contrast. You can use lowerCamel and UpperCamel to denote the same levels of significance. SCREAMING_SNAKE is fine for constants because they don't get used all that often, but rust maps the hardest-to-type case to the most-frequently-used, which in my opinion is an ergonomic failure.
  - 6y ago