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I'll make one (probably unpopular) comment. On HN every time the subject of language wars or platform wars or browser wars comes up, the idea also comes up tha

I'll make one (probably unpopular) comment. On HN every time the subject of language wars or platform wars or browser wars comes up, the idea also comes up that "everything is about the number of users". The self-reinforcing cycle is that the language/platform/browser with the most users also has the most development time put into it, which then attracts more users, etc. Fine, I don't deny that the phenomenon exists. But I think that it's often overlooked that it's not just about the number of users. It's also about the quality of the users. If we could quantify "an excellent developer", I wouldn't claim that Julia has more of those than Python. But I'm convinced that Julia has more "excellent developers who are also excellent at numerics" than Python. I think the idea that the productivity as function of "developer excellence percentile" is a power-law applies even more strongly in multi-domain expertise situations, like numerical computing. So forget about 100x coders. The contributions of some people like Chris et al are closer to 10_000x as significant as that of an ok contributor. It's not just about the quantity, it's also about quality.

ihnorton 6y ago
I won’t comment on the relative numbers because there are top-notch developers in many language communities. I think the more important point is that Julia has attracted enough first-rate people to self-sustainably build out an ecosystem — and even more keep joining. Several aspects of Julia’s design and core tooling interact to provide compounding leverage to this group. I think it’s a similar situation to the development of the NumPy ecosystem where standardizing on a common array data structure and API led to an explosion of interoperable libraries. Julia arguably takes that a step further by allowing any code to interoperate with high performance and fluent APIs. Julia’s performance characteristics also reduce the barrier to entry because people can make deep contributions throughout the ecosystem without needing to develop low-level programming expertise on top of their domain-specific knowledge.

ihnorton 6y ago

I won’t comment on the relative numbers because there are top-notch developers in many language communities. I think the more important point is that Julia has attracted enough first-rate people to self-sustainably build out an ecosystem — and even more keep joining. Several aspects of Julia’s design and core tooling interact to provide compounding leverage to this group. I think it’s a similar situation to the development of the NumPy ecosystem where standardizing on a common array data structure and API led to an explosion of interoperable libraries. Julia arguably takes that a step further by allowing any code to interoperate with high performance and fluent APIs. Julia’s performance characteristics also reduce the barrier to entry because people can make deep contributions throughout the ecosystem without needing to develop low-level programming expertise on top of their domain-specific knowledge.