4 ms·
While I don't think this piece was well argued I must agreee with the sentiment that Julia is somewhat of a disappointment, at least for me personally. Last yea
by ruph123 6y ago
While I don't think this piece was well argued I must agreee with the sentiment that Julia is somewhat of a disappointment, at least for me personally.
Last year I started learning Rust and wanted to use it instead of C++ in the future. I since have programmed quite a lot in it, contributed to open source software and absolutely have fallen in love with it.
So this year I wanted to replace my default scripting language (Python) with Julia and potentially use it for my simulations or ML in the future.
But every time I take a stab at Julia - last time around the release of version 1 - it never really stops feeling foreign. Everything is slightly unintuitive and weird. Also, learning Julia made me realize how amazing Rust's learning resources are. Besides the official book and the API docs (with an amazing template), there are a lot of great third party and actively maintained resources likes cheats.rs. I never felt Rust was unituitive or hard to learn. Even if some concepts are unique, the resources do a great job of introducing them to you. While Julia's learning website lists an exercism course, its manual and a bunch of video lectures.
I think selling Julia as a Python competitor raises wrong expectations. Julia may look easy or Python-like but is far more difficult to use IMHO. They may be similar in terms of applications but at least in how they feel to use, they are very different.
I still haven't given up but whereas I speak very highly and enthusiastically of Rust and recommend it everywhere (yes I am one of those people), I cannot see myself doing the same for Julia in the future.
Ps.: I wish there was a book club-like way of learning programming languages and discussing progress with friends. That would make learning even more fun.
- dgellow 6y ago> Ps.: I wish there was a book club-like way of learning programming languages and discussing progress with friends. That would make learning even more fun. That might be an awesome idea for a Clubhouse club! A weekly programming language meetup with a theme decided in advance.
- ruph123 6y agoOr an Element chat? I would not sign up with that service because of their sketchy privacy setup.
- mountainriver 6y agoI share the exact same sentiment. I really tried hard to like Julia, spent months with it because of all the shortcomings of python. I submerged myself in its community, but at the end of the day it just never stopped feeling odd. I’ve also recently learned Rust to replace C++ and it’s an absolute pleasure. I do think there’s a lot of room for a new data analysis language. It’s just not Julia, I’ve been writing all my ML stuff in Rust and that’s actually been a lot of fun although I don’t see that as getting picked up by the mainstream.
- ruph123 6y agoYeah it is really apparent how much excitement their is for Rust. This is also quite noticeable in the community which is also super friendly and helpful. And the fact that tools get rewritten in Rust left and right instead of using mature frameworks in other language speaks to the incredible momentum. The hype train is certainly deserved.