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Julia will never become a mainstream language because it is not general enough. The syntax is inspired by matlab which is good for linear algebra. Also it is no

Julia will never become a mainstream language because it is not general enough. The syntax is inspired by matlab which is good for linear algebra. Also it is not object oriented which is probably the most popular paradigm. Python will not be overtaken soon by such an exotic language.

stellalo 6y ago
Object orientation is no “must have” for a general purpose language to become popular. OO is a paradigm like many others, and it is one that in my opinion is much more abused than, say, functional features. In a few years we will look back at all those class hierarchies and wonder: man, what the hell were we thinking.
socialdemocrat 6y ago
Of course Julia is general enough. Whether you end your for-loop with `end` or `}` doesn't make any difference in what you can use the language for. That Matlab is not great at general programming has absolutely nothing to do with the syntax and everything to do with semantics. In Matlab pretty much everything is a matrix. That is not the case in Julia. Julia work with scalar values just as well as Python. Actually it does it much better. Object-oriented programming has been on the way out from all major new languages for years now. Go, Rust, Kotlin, Clojure, Julia and many others have downplayed object-oriented programming significantly.
krumbie 6y ago
I'd actually say the opposite. In my experience, n-dimensional arrays for example are very useful for problems that don't have anything to do with linear algebra. And in Julia it's just so convenient that all the high level functions manipulating such arrays are fast, and therefore much simpler to write.
Recurecur 6y ago
'Also it is not object oriented which is probably the most popular paradigm.' Popularity isn't a suitable metric for 'good'. Look at McDonald's food. 'Python will not be overtaken soon by such an exotic language.' Python and Julia aren't competitors. Python is suitable for scripts and gluing high performance code together. Julia is a general purpose language which is suitable for writing high performance code. Object orientation was likely a mistake. The industry is slowly moving away from it. There is no abstraction you can express with object orientation that you can't express with multiple dispatch. Structs are very much like the data part of objects.
leephillips 6y ago
“...not general enough [...] not object oriented...” The object oriented model is a subset of the more general multiple dispatch model offered by Julia. So these two notions contradict each other.

stellalo 6y ago

Object orientation is no “must have” for a general purpose language to become popular. OO is a paradigm like many others, and it is one that in my opinion is much more abused than, say, functional features. In a few years we will look back at all those class hierarchies and wonder: man, what the hell were we thinking.

socialdemocrat 6y ago

Of course Julia is general enough. Whether you end your for-loop with `end` or `}` doesn't make any difference in what you can use the language for. That Matlab is not great at general programming has absolutely nothing to do with the syntax and everything to do with semantics. In Matlab pretty much everything is a matrix. That is not the case in Julia. Julia work with scalar values just as well as Python. Actually it does it much better. Object-oriented programming has been on the way out from all major new languages for years now. Go, Rust, Kotlin, Clojure, Julia and many others have downplayed object-oriented programming significantly.

krumbie 6y ago

I'd actually say the opposite. In my experience, n-dimensional arrays for example are very useful for problems that don't have anything to do with linear algebra. And in Julia it's just so convenient that all the high level functions manipulating such arrays are fast, and therefore much simpler to write.

Recurecur 6y ago

'Also it is not object oriented which is probably the most popular paradigm.' Popularity isn't a suitable metric for 'good'. Look at McDonald's food. 'Python will not be overtaken soon by such an exotic language.' Python and Julia aren't competitors. Python is suitable for scripts and gluing high performance code together. Julia is a general purpose language which is suitable for writing high performance code. Object orientation was likely a mistake. The industry is slowly moving away from it. There is no abstraction you can express with object orientation that you can't express with multiple dispatch. Structs are very much like the data part of objects.

leephillips 6y ago

“...not general enough [...] not object oriented...” The object oriented model is a subset of the more general multiple dispatch model offered by Julia. So these two notions contradict each other.