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I agree, I have the same love/hate relationship with Julia. When the stars align, the language and its ecosystem are incredibly fast and pleasant to use. But m
by shakow 5y ago
I agree, I have the same love/hate relationship with Julia. When the stars align, the language and its ecosystem are incredibly fast and pleasant to use.
But most of the time, it is waiting for the incredibly slow doc website; trying to reverse engineer the lib that everyone presents you like the best there is, but is woefully underdocumented – if it is documented at all; delving through bad stacktraces; struggling with the abysmal multithreading experience; hoping for small syntaxic sugar such as a better syntax for one-line conditional execution than &&, do/while loops, or if-as-expressions while we get an nth unicode operator; waiting for plots; the REPL being unable to redefine structs; getting enthusiastic about AD, until understanding that it is so slow that is basically only works on toy problems; etc.
All in all, the language and its ecosystem gives the impression that it is not much more than heaps over heaps of promising PoCs stacked on each other, but would need thousand of CS engineering man-hours to go from promising academic project to actually usable environment.
- blindseer 5y agoI agree about the PoCs stacked on top of each other and the thousands of CS man hours required to transform it, I don’t think I could have said it better. There’s some really really neat projects in the Julia community though, and some super smart and very hard working people. I’m wondering if some focused effort from the community guided by the stewards of the language may yield promising results? As opposed to letting people that are interested in a topic just naturally contribute?
- shakow 5y ago> There’s some really really neat projects in the Julia community though, and some super smart and very hard working people Absolutely. The people behind Turing, Flux, Zygote, and many others are obviously gifted. But they really need to invest on the practical CS side of things if they wish to further the general use of Julia – something that if unfortunately hard to sell in an academic context :/