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In my opinion the most important positive thing Julia has is the Compsci community it attracted. There has never been so much enthusiasm in oftware for doing p

In my opinion the most important positive thing Julia has is the Compsci community it attracted. There has never been so much enthusiasm in oftware for doing physical simulations and correct and stable arithmetics. It made a sizeable dent in the Fortran/C++/Python/Matlab environment physicists were in. That said even after 10 years Julia has still so many rough edges that I wouldn't employ it for anything outside the aforementioned use case. Just getting it to Plot something in a headless environment was a pain. Essential utilities like debuggers (!) are external dependencies. Matrix/Vector/Array confusion permeates the air. Ditto for a syntax annoyingly in the middle between Matlab, Python and Fortran. Given it is already not that young I predict it will never really attract the masses beyond its niche, but it can still kill the remaining Fortran codebases.

jakobnissen 5y ago
It's a little hard to say "after 10 years" when Julia has been at 1.0 for 3 years only. And remember, that's not with Rust's niche of low-level developers, but with a niche of people who are generally not programmers, and therefore much more conservative about their languages! It's surprisingly hard to get good data about how quickly Julia grows, but it certainly doesn't look like it's plateauing yet. It's just too early to know how far it'll go and where it will end up in 10 years.
- NationalPark 5y ago
  If anything, Julia becoming popular with academics makes me extremely skeptical about its missing guardrails. Obviously anecdotal, but I have many years of experience working with academics and statisticians and I know to be wary when they suddenly like a new technology. Usually it's because it makes it easier to swallow errors somehow, or because their friend wrote it and sent them an email about it.
  - jakobnissen 5y ago
    Ha! That's hilarious. Yeah, I've seen some real horrorshows of programming in my field. I think it's important to realize, though, that academics do have a special use-case when programming. That is, academics don't pick e.g. Python because they are bad programmers and don't know what they are doing, but because Python is a good fit for their needs. I see Julia as an excellent - near-perfect, in fact - academic programming language. That Julia excels at this use case does not mean it's bad at everything else.
    - NationalPark 5y ago
      Just giving you a hard time... I do think the performance improvements alone make Julia a serious contender. I've seen a lot of valuable engineering time spent rewriting algorithms in C++ for scientists who know Python. To speed up their iteration loop without bringing in performance experts would be great.

jakobnissen 5y ago

It's a little hard to say "after 10 years" when Julia has been at 1.0 for 3 years only. And remember, that's not with Rust's niche of low-level developers, but with a niche of people who are generally not programmers, and therefore much more conservative about their languages! It's surprisingly hard to get good data about how quickly Julia grows, but it certainly doesn't look like it's plateauing yet. It's just too early to know how far it'll go and where it will end up in 10 years.

NationalPark 5y ago
If anything, Julia becoming popular with academics makes me extremely skeptical about its missing guardrails. Obviously anecdotal, but I have many years of experience working with academics and statisticians and I know to be wary when they suddenly like a new technology. Usually it's because it makes it easier to swallow errors somehow, or because their friend wrote it and sent them an email about it.
- jakobnissen 5y ago
  Ha! That's hilarious. Yeah, I've seen some real horrorshows of programming in my field. I think it's important to realize, though, that academics do have a special use-case when programming. That is, academics don't pick e.g. Python because they are bad programmers and don't know what they are doing, but because Python is a good fit for their needs. I see Julia as an excellent - near-perfect, in fact - academic programming language. That Julia excels at this use case does not mean it's bad at everything else.
  - NationalPark 5y ago
    Just giving you a hard time... I do think the performance improvements alone make Julia a serious contender. I've seen a lot of valuable engineering time spent rewriting algorithms in C++ for scientists who know Python. To speed up their iteration loop without bringing in performance experts would be great.