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Great summary. I've worked with scientists that love Julia and more power to them. As a software engineer, there are still rough edges in productionizing Julia

Great summary. I've worked with scientists that love Julia and more power to them. As a software engineer, there are still rough edges in productionizing Julia (yes, I know there are a few examples of large scale production code). As soon as you take Julia out of notebooks and try to build moderately complex apps with it, you realize how much you miss Python. Having used Julia for last 4 years and having to maintain that code in production environment, I am strongly convinced that Julia has a niche but it is not going to be a contestant to Python/Java/C++ depending on the use case. Which really is a shame - I want one goddamn language to rule them all. I want that and tried to give a fair chance to Julia.

amkkma 5y ago
> As soon as you take Julia out of notebooks and try to build moderately complex apps with it, you realize how much you miss Python Why's that? What features or lack thereof of Julia contribute to that experience?
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  There is too much to talk about and I’d want to give an objective impression with examples in a blog post, but one of the major grips I have is how little information Julia provides you with stack traces. Debugging production problems with absolutely zero clue of what/where the problem might be is one of the most frustrating aspects. I’ve spent so many hours debugging Julia using print statements. Debugger is janky, Juno/Atom support is not very good. Nothing feels polished and robust. Dependencies break all the time. We are stuck with Julia 1.2 and too much of an undertaking to go to latest version. Package management is an absolute disaster - this is the case with Python but Julia is worse. Julia Registry has many issues (compat errors). Testing and mocking is also underwhelming. I think startup times have improved but still not very developer-friendly. Sorry not an objective answer you’re looking for. There also things that Python has such as excellent web-dev ecosystem and system libs that are missing in Julia. Python has everything. Want to generate a QR code image? Easy in Python. Want to create PDF reports with custom ttf fonts? A breeze in Python.
  - mbauman 5y ago
    > We are stuck with Julia 1.2 Gosh, that's really old and it's not even an LTS version. I fear many of your woes stem from that. Julia 1.6 has huge improvements, and the community has rallied around VS Code now that Atom seems to be dying. It really shouldn't be too bad to update.
  - leephillips 5y ago
    This is the first time I’ve heard somebody say that Julia’s package management is worse than Python’s! For most people who have spent years grappling with the succession of unofficial attempts to supply Python with something like package management, including virtual environments, etc., and the resulting dependency hell, Julia’s integrated and sophisticated package management (even with its own special REPL mode) is refreshing. I don’t doubt your experiences are real, but suspect you have just had really bad luck. 1.2 is pretty ancient. Current, or even recent, versions of Julia have a fraction of the startup time (https://lwn.net/Articles/856819/ https://lwn.net/Articles/856819/). Package management has been refined further, as well.
    - systemvoltage 5y ago
      I’m a tortured soul, my opinions might be biased and I hope things improve with Julia. We absolutely cannot upgrade Julia version right now, dozens of repos full of complicated scientific code. Management doesn’t care as far as it barely runs. I don’t think it’s fair to blame Julia for it but it just shows how much more it needs to go. That should be looked at as a positive thing. I have one more complain to Julia community - please don’t be too defensive. Accept and embrace criticisms and turn that into a propellant for improving the language. I’ve seen a cult-like behavior in Julia community that is borderline toxic. Sorry, it’s the truth and needs to be said. Speed isn’t everything and people are magnetized by the benchmarks on the Julia website, especially non-software engineers.
      - amkkma 5y ago
        >I’ve seen a cult-like behavior in Julia community that is borderline toxic. Sorry, it’s the truth and needs to be said. Speed isn’t everything and people are magnetized by the benchmarks on the Julia website, especially non-software engineers. I think all languages have this dynamic...I've seen it with python and R. To some extent it's fed by what we perceive as criticisms from people defending their favorite incumbent language with arguments that aren't at all informed- such as a focus on speed and how numba achieves parity there. In the same vein, I and many Julia users are enthusiastic precisely because of thing other than speed, such as the type system, abstractions, differentiability and other things that make programming more joyful, fluid and productive. Agree though, that we could always improve on acceptance of criticism.
snicker7 5y ago
What warts did you encounter? What language features / tooling would make Julia easier to productionize?

amkkma 5y ago

> As soon as you take Julia out of notebooks and try to build moderately complex apps with it, you realize how much you miss Python Why's that? What features or lack thereof of Julia contribute to that experience?

systemvoltage 5y ago
There is too much to talk about and I’d want to give an objective impression with examples in a blog post, but one of the major grips I have is how little information Julia provides you with stack traces. Debugging production problems with absolutely zero clue of what/where the problem might be is one of the most frustrating aspects. I’ve spent so many hours debugging Julia using print statements. Debugger is janky, Juno/Atom support is not very good. Nothing feels polished and robust. Dependencies break all the time. We are stuck with Julia 1.2 and too much of an undertaking to go to latest version. Package management is an absolute disaster - this is the case with Python but Julia is worse. Julia Registry has many issues (compat errors). Testing and mocking is also underwhelming. I think startup times have improved but still not very developer-friendly. Sorry not an objective answer you’re looking for. There also things that Python has such as excellent web-dev ecosystem and system libs that are missing in Julia. Python has everything. Want to generate a QR code image? Easy in Python. Want to create PDF reports with custom ttf fonts? A breeze in Python.
- mbauman 5y ago
  > We are stuck with Julia 1.2 Gosh, that's really old and it's not even an LTS version. I fear many of your woes stem from that. Julia 1.6 has huge improvements, and the community has rallied around VS Code now that Atom seems to be dying. It really shouldn't be too bad to update.
- leephillips 5y ago
  This is the first time I’ve heard somebody say that Julia’s package management is worse than Python’s! For most people who have spent years grappling with the succession of unofficial attempts to supply Python with something like package management, including virtual environments, etc., and the resulting dependency hell, Julia’s integrated and sophisticated package management (even with its own special REPL mode) is refreshing. I don’t doubt your experiences are real, but suspect you have just had really bad luck. 1.2 is pretty ancient. Current, or even recent, versions of Julia have a fraction of the startup time (https://lwn.net/Articles/856819/ https://lwn.net/Articles/856819/). Package management has been refined further, as well.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    I’m a tortured soul, my opinions might be biased and I hope things improve with Julia. We absolutely cannot upgrade Julia version right now, dozens of repos full of complicated scientific code. Management doesn’t care as far as it barely runs. I don’t think it’s fair to blame Julia for it but it just shows how much more it needs to go. That should be looked at as a positive thing. I have one more complain to Julia community - please don’t be too defensive. Accept and embrace criticisms and turn that into a propellant for improving the language. I’ve seen a cult-like behavior in Julia community that is borderline toxic. Sorry, it’s the truth and needs to be said. Speed isn’t everything and people are magnetized by the benchmarks on the Julia website, especially non-software engineers.
    - amkkma 5y ago
      >I’ve seen a cult-like behavior in Julia community that is borderline toxic. Sorry, it’s the truth and needs to be said. Speed isn’t everything and people are magnetized by the benchmarks on the Julia website, especially non-software engineers. I think all languages have this dynamic...I've seen it with python and R. To some extent it's fed by what we perceive as criticisms from people defending their favorite incumbent language with arguments that aren't at all informed- such as a focus on speed and how numba achieves parity there. In the same vein, I and many Julia users are enthusiastic precisely because of thing other than speed, such as the type system, abstractions, differentiability and other things that make programming more joyful, fluid and productive. Agree though, that we could always improve on acceptance of criticism.

snicker7 5y ago

What warts did you encounter? What language features / tooling would make Julia easier to productionize?