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The gap between how fantastic the language is according to Julia fanboys and how annoying my experience has been is very hard on me. Everything needs to instal

The gap between how fantastic the language is according to Julia fanboys and how annoying my experience has been is very hard on me. Everything needs to install a package, even simple debugging. Graphics is very broken, especially for headless environments. You get incomprehensible, unfixable, error messages since everything is statically linked. But you don't get speed since everything has to compile first. Unicode symbols are encouraged (at minimum it takes an order of magnitude more to type/paste/convert some Greek symbol than to type an English letter). All the experience you feel a smug attitude coming from the environment "we make everything perfect, thoughtful, beautiful for you, if something breaks is your fault" but then something actually breaks... The most beautiful thing about the language is the computational physics community' enthusiasm about it (probably in the hope of finally abandoning Fortran). So JuliaCon's conferences are actually good and you find a lot of interesting computational problems solved in the language. Only that the basic unfriendliness and unsmooth experience, coupled with a lot of immature features, really ruins it for me.

jstx1 5y ago
Absolutely agree about the disconnect between my own experience and the views coming from the community. It has made an already frustrating experience even more off putting.
- blindseer 5y ago
  I agree that the experience is extremely off putting. But having been in the community for almost 5 years now, I have to say there are super awesome lovely people that are mostly silently working in the background and very hard at that. The loud minority unfortunately is grating, and I do wish the stewards of the language established more strict guidelines on conduct or philosophy of the language. I don’t want to name names here, but when prominent members of the Julia community bash other programming languages while ignoring the painful friction in Julia, it comes across as very tone deaf and in poor taste, and does set a bad precedent. I think having a weekly what’s great about Python/Rust/Go/Zig and how can we port this to Julia would be awesome, instead of the weekly gripes about Python/MATLAB/R.
  - qsort 5y ago
    > the weekly gripes about Python/MATLAB/R At the cost of repeating the old Bjarne quote for the millionth time, you hear complaints because those are languages that people use in their day-to-day. If only Julia were more popular, you'd definitely see it get caught in the crossfire. Also worth noting that in terms of intended audience Julia is more like Matlab and R than Python, most of the more abstract part of the discussion would likely apply to Julia to a lesser degree.
  - mbauman 5y ago
    As a moderator on the primary discussion board — discourse — please do flag problematic posts and/or DM me. We don't see everything and rely on flags.
qsort 5y ago
It might be because my background is CS and not hard science, but non-ASCII variable names are one of the most baffling decisions I have ever seen in any programming language. Whatever reading comprehension advantage they may carry is completely negated by the fact that they can't be typed from a regular keyboard. I hear it's gaining traction, though, so it's likely many of the problems you mention will be fixed or mitigated, eventually.
- sannee 5y ago
  Supporting the LaTeX expansion is just a necessary feature of any Julia-compatible code editor. It is not then particularly more difficult to type `\sigma` over `sigma`. Also note that other languages often support non-ASCII identifiers as well --- for example, `σ` is a completely valid identifier name in Python (though it is more restrictive than Julia, `σ²` is not valid in Python and yet is valid in Julia). It even works in C, but that might just be a GNU extension.
  - jstx1 5y ago
    It's not just identifiers though, it's also operators. To take an example from the OP article, I can't relate to anyone who claims that ∛x is better than cbrt(x). The fact that this is not only allowed but actively encouraged is absolutely baffling to me.
    - maccam912 5y ago
      Eh, I have to diagree on that. A mathematician reading ∛x in code will immediately know what it means, but that isn't necessarily true when seeing cbrt(x). Julia was written for mathematicians, not programmers, and takes some getting used to.
      - jstx1 5y ago
        The mathematician still has to type \cbrt + tab to type the glyph so they have to know the name of the function. Not only that, they have to know the name of the function from reading the Unicode glyph or be constantly pasting characters into the REPL. I don't get how that's more efficient in any way.
clarkevans 5y ago
> Julia fanboys > smug attitude This is a bit over the top, don't you think? Julia is an open community with varied contributors. I've not seen any core contributors here claiming Julia is perfect, if anything, they are conscientious about the "first time to print" and numerous other issues. Developers using Julia commenting here offer their unvarnished experience and critique.
IshKebab 5y ago
I agree, it's like they looked at the typical C++ compilation experience and thought "I wish Matlab had those issues too!"
gbrown 5y ago
I’ve been really enjoying it since 1.6 came out. A lot of the points you raise are perfectly valid, but the speed difference coming from R and python is real (so long as you’re writing computationally intensive programs and not scripts, for which it is a bad tool at the moment). There’s less friction to get performant code compared to writing supplemental functions in C++. Also, I have to disagree with the unicode issue. The target audience is heavily invested in latex, so typing things like \theta is natural. It also results in code which is more terse compared to writing out all the letters, and at least for me results in a somewhat lower cognitive overhead when implementing algorithms etc.

jstx1 5y ago

Absolutely agree about the disconnect between my own experience and the views coming from the community. It has made an already frustrating experience even more off putting.

blindseer 5y ago
I agree that the experience is extremely off putting. But having been in the community for almost 5 years now, I have to say there are super awesome lovely people that are mostly silently working in the background and very hard at that. The loud minority unfortunately is grating, and I do wish the stewards of the language established more strict guidelines on conduct or philosophy of the language. I don’t want to name names here, but when prominent members of the Julia community bash other programming languages while ignoring the painful friction in Julia, it comes across as very tone deaf and in poor taste, and does set a bad precedent. I think having a weekly what’s great about Python/Rust/Go/Zig and how can we port this to Julia would be awesome, instead of the weekly gripes about Python/MATLAB/R.
- qsort 5y ago
  > the weekly gripes about Python/MATLAB/R At the cost of repeating the old Bjarne quote for the millionth time, you hear complaints because those are languages that people use in their day-to-day. If only Julia were more popular, you'd definitely see it get caught in the crossfire. Also worth noting that in terms of intended audience Julia is more like Matlab and R than Python, most of the more abstract part of the discussion would likely apply to Julia to a lesser degree.
- mbauman 5y ago
  As a moderator on the primary discussion board — discourse — please do flag problematic posts and/or DM me. We don't see everything and rely on flags.

qsort 5y ago

It might be because my background is CS and not hard science, but non-ASCII variable names are one of the most baffling decisions I have ever seen in any programming language. Whatever reading comprehension advantage they may carry is completely negated by the fact that they can't be typed from a regular keyboard. I hear it's gaining traction, though, so it's likely many of the problems you mention will be fixed or mitigated, eventually.

sannee 5y ago
Supporting the LaTeX expansion is just a necessary feature of any Julia-compatible code editor. It is not then particularly more difficult to type `\sigma` over `sigma`. Also note that other languages often support non-ASCII identifiers as well --- for example, `σ` is a completely valid identifier name in Python (though it is more restrictive than Julia, `σ²` is not valid in Python and yet is valid in Julia). It even works in C, but that might just be a GNU extension.
- jstx1 5y ago
  It's not just identifiers though, it's also operators. To take an example from the OP article, I can't relate to anyone who claims that ∛x is better than cbrt(x). The fact that this is not only allowed but actively encouraged is absolutely baffling to me.
  - maccam912 5y ago
    Eh, I have to diagree on that. A mathematician reading ∛x in code will immediately know what it means, but that isn't necessarily true when seeing cbrt(x). Julia was written for mathematicians, not programmers, and takes some getting used to.
    - jstx1 5y ago
      The mathematician still has to type \cbrt + tab to type the glyph so they have to know the name of the function. Not only that, they have to know the name of the function from reading the Unicode glyph or be constantly pasting characters into the REPL. I don't get how that's more efficient in any way.

clarkevans 5y ago

> Julia fanboys > smug attitude This is a bit over the top, don't you think? Julia is an open community with varied contributors. I've not seen any core contributors here claiming Julia is perfect, if anything, they are conscientious about the "first time to print" and numerous other issues. Developers using Julia commenting here offer their unvarnished experience and critique.

IshKebab 5y ago

I agree, it's like they looked at the typical C++ compilation experience and thought "I wish Matlab had those issues too!"

gbrown 5y ago

I’ve been really enjoying it since 1.6 came out. A lot of the points you raise are perfectly valid, but the speed difference coming from R and python is real (so long as you’re writing computationally intensive programs and not scripts, for which it is a bad tool at the moment). There’s less friction to get performant code compared to writing supplemental functions in C++. Also, I have to disagree with the unicode issue. The target audience is heavily invested in latex, so typing things like \theta is natural. It also results in code which is more terse compared to writing out all the letters, and at least for me results in a somewhat lower cognitive overhead when implementing algorithms etc.