4 ms·

It's sad to see that the Julia ecosystem does not address these issues at all. Maybe Julia people are in some kind of bubble of people who like Julia and genera

It's sad to see that the Julia ecosystem does not address these issues at all. Maybe Julia people are in some kind of bubble of people who like Julia and generalize that to all potential users and contributors. The true process is probably that people with other workflows (eg. non-REPL/Notebook) and past experiences (esp. more "general purpose" languages) just give up and are never heard of again. I've ranted about very similar things for some time now, and had some fruitful discussions, and I even offered to help to try to scratch some of the itches me and others are suffering from. I've now mostly given up too. It's a bit sad for me. I think Julia has many things right and the core concepts are potentially revolutionary. But for me it seems that Julia ecosystem is a bit too jealous of their discovery to let it free. Weird.

jampekka 5y ago
Actually not probably that weird. May be a sort of impedance mismatch between academia and software scenes. It's very common in academic circles to be quite jealous of ideas, especially good ones. The academic game is often to get your name associated with some good idea, and this is what carries a researcher in their career. I find this rather counterproductive and try to avoid it myself. I'm a researcher but I have a background in software development, and especially open source. Academia is way behind software in openness, which is rather bizarre as the institutional role of academia is usually seen as providing new ideas and challenging old thinking so the community can prosper. There's some kind of a bug in the current academic culture that causes it to freeze up when it should fulfill its promise to share its findings with the world. Probably a good way to debug this thing is to follow the money and why on earth do we have these weird hats and robes?
orbots 5y ago
I'm a Julia user who has also given up as a Julia community member. The bubble is real. I found too often when I wanted to do something outside of that bubble and asked for help, I got unhelpful advice which amounted to "why do you want do something outside of our bubble?"
- dklend122 5y ago
  Can you give some examples?
  - orbots 5y ago
    One example. Not a very important one, but illustrative. https://discourse.julialang.org/t/why-no-base-iterators-map/14280 https://discourse.julialang.org/t/why-no-base-iterators-map/... The "bubble effect" here was assumption that everyone has internet access and dependencies to external ( community maintained ) packages are zero cost. Happily 2 years later this was resolved to my satisfaction.
acmj 5y ago
I agree. The Julia community is defensive. When you criticize Julia, often their first reaction is to say you are doing something wrong or to convince you Julia is perfect for everything. I was enthusiastic about Julia but not anymore.
- Tainnor 5y ago
  It's not the first community with that attitude that I've witnessed. I've first seen this with Ember.JS (the Javascript framework everybody has forgotten about), then later with the Swift programming language. It could be interesting to investigate why things like this happen and how a community needs to be managed in order not to run into the same problem.
  - mbauman 5y ago
    I'm a moderator at Julia's discourse site. We've seen this happen and we're working on improving this, but I'm also (biased and) sympathetic to the "Julia community" writ large. Julia's optimal sorts of workflows are different than many expect — especially for folks coming from static languages. Julia is a dynamic language. But also, Julia isn't Python. There are ways in which your workflows from other languages just aren't optimal in Julia. So when someone comes in "hot" and rants about how their workflow isn't working out how they expect, others jump in and — yes, defensively at times — point out alternatives that work for them. I think some of this tension comes from an expectation mismatch. Some of the changes noted in these comments about how Julia is presented on julialang.org were made specifically due to this sort of expectation mismatch. This doesn't mean that nobody in the community cares about improving workflows — in fact I know that's not true. But if you want to use Julia today, there are definitely some happy paths that we should guide folks towards.
    - Tainnor 5y ago
      > Julia's optimal sorts of workflows are different than many expect — especially for folks coming from static languages. Julia is a dynamic language. But also, Julia isn't Python. There are ways in which your workflows from other languages just aren't optimal in Julia. So when someone comes in "hot" and rants about how their workflow isn't working out how they expect, others jump in and — yes, defensively at times — point out alternatives that work for them. And that's exactly what I've seen over and over again, in different communities, such as the ones I've mentioned, this attitude of "you're holding it wrong". No language or tool can be everything to everybody, that's perfectly reasonable. If the goal of Julia is different from that of people that want to run applications in production—or at least those concerns aren't the most important ones—fair enough. But all too often (and I'm not necessarily talking about Julia here; I haven't spent enough time on the Julia forums, I'm mostly referring to some of the other examples I've cited) real concerns are just dismissed out of hand. I also don't believe that enforcing certain very specific workflows at the exclusion of any others is necessarily a great way to become a language that lots of people want to use. People come from different backgrounds and have different preferences and needs (sometimes for very good reasons), successful languages like Python recognise this and let you work with a wide range of tools. Finally, I'm just very skeptical about a certain kind of NIH syndrome that I've seen in some of these communities, something like "encapsulation? well, all these other languages might need it, but we actually don't, because XYZ" or similar things.

jampekka 5y ago

Actually not probably that weird. May be a sort of impedance mismatch between academia and software scenes. It's very common in academic circles to be quite jealous of ideas, especially good ones. The academic game is often to get your name associated with some good idea, and this is what carries a researcher in their career. I find this rather counterproductive and try to avoid it myself. I'm a researcher but I have a background in software development, and especially open source. Academia is way behind software in openness, which is rather bizarre as the institutional role of academia is usually seen as providing new ideas and challenging old thinking so the community can prosper. There's some kind of a bug in the current academic culture that causes it to freeze up when it should fulfill its promise to share its findings with the world. Probably a good way to debug this thing is to follow the money and why on earth do we have these weird hats and robes?

orbots 5y ago

I'm a Julia user who has also given up as a Julia community member. The bubble is real. I found too often when I wanted to do something outside of that bubble and asked for help, I got unhelpful advice which amounted to "why do you want do something outside of our bubble?"

dklend122 5y ago
Can you give some examples?
- orbots 5y ago
  One example. Not a very important one, but illustrative. https://discourse.julialang.org/t/why-no-base-iterators-map/14280 https://discourse.julialang.org/t/why-no-base-iterators-map/... The "bubble effect" here was assumption that everyone has internet access and dependencies to external ( community maintained ) packages are zero cost. Happily 2 years later this was resolved to my satisfaction.

acmj 5y ago

I agree. The Julia community is defensive. When you criticize Julia, often their first reaction is to say you are doing something wrong or to convince you Julia is perfect for everything. I was enthusiastic about Julia but not anymore.

Tainnor 5y ago
It's not the first community with that attitude that I've witnessed. I've first seen this with Ember.JS (the Javascript framework everybody has forgotten about), then later with the Swift programming language. It could be interesting to investigate why things like this happen and how a community needs to be managed in order not to run into the same problem.
- mbauman 5y ago
  I'm a moderator at Julia's discourse site. We've seen this happen and we're working on improving this, but I'm also (biased and) sympathetic to the "Julia community" writ large. Julia's optimal sorts of workflows are different than many expect — especially for folks coming from static languages. Julia is a dynamic language. But also, Julia isn't Python. There are ways in which your workflows from other languages just aren't optimal in Julia. So when someone comes in "hot" and rants about how their workflow isn't working out how they expect, others jump in and — yes, defensively at times — point out alternatives that work for them. I think some of this tension comes from an expectation mismatch. Some of the changes noted in these comments about how Julia is presented on julialang.org were made specifically due to this sort of expectation mismatch. This doesn't mean that nobody in the community cares about improving workflows — in fact I know that's not true. But if you want to use Julia today, there are definitely some happy paths that we should guide folks towards.
  - Tainnor 5y ago
    > Julia's optimal sorts of workflows are different than many expect — especially for folks coming from static languages. Julia is a dynamic language. But also, Julia isn't Python. There are ways in which your workflows from other languages just aren't optimal in Julia. So when someone comes in "hot" and rants about how their workflow isn't working out how they expect, others jump in and — yes, defensively at times — point out alternatives that work for them. And that's exactly what I've seen over and over again, in different communities, such as the ones I've mentioned, this attitude of "you're holding it wrong". No language or tool can be everything to everybody, that's perfectly reasonable. If the goal of Julia is different from that of people that want to run applications in production—or at least those concerns aren't the most important ones—fair enough. But all too often (and I'm not necessarily talking about Julia here; I haven't spent enough time on the Julia forums, I'm mostly referring to some of the other examples I've cited) real concerns are just dismissed out of hand. I also don't believe that enforcing certain very specific workflows at the exclusion of any others is necessarily a great way to become a language that lots of people want to use. People come from different backgrounds and have different preferences and needs (sometimes for very good reasons), successful languages like Python recognise this and let you work with a wide range of tools. Finally, I'm just very skeptical about a certain kind of NIH syndrome that I've seen in some of these communities, something like "encapsulation? well, all these other languages might need it, but we actually don't, because XYZ" or similar things.