4 ms·

I've been using C++ and Python since the early 2000s. Julia these days is my go to free time language to hack together stuff in, partially because I've been imp

by fault1 5y ago

I've been using C++ and Python since the early 2000s. Julia these days is my go to free time language to hack together stuff in, partially because I've been impressed with what comes out of that ecosystem despite the smaller community. I think this is at least a testament with how composable things are relative to C++ or python. I love many things about Julia, but there are definitely growing pains for the language and I can see why it may be a hard sale to people used to modern python or C++, both of which have improved since Julia came out. However, Julia has it's own goals that might make certain communities veer towards it. It'll be interesting to see if it gets more adoption in industry.

chaxor 5y ago
The way I see Julia now is how I saw python ~12 years ago
- tfehring 5y ago
  I agree, but it's probably closer to 20 years IMO, which makes sense given that Python has been around for 21 years longer. By 2009 Python was already in widespread use at Google/YouTube and (I think) Mozilla, plus startups like Reddit and Dropbox. Hell, Steve Huffman wrote "Lots of people have written web applications in Python, and there's plenty of code from which to learn" as one justification for Reddit's Python rewrite in 2005 [0]. No one is saying that about Julia today, it's seeing very little use in the private sector at this point. [0] http://web.archive.org/web/20051230163903/http://reddit.com/blog/2005/12/on-lisp.html http://web.archive.org/web/20051230163903/http://reddit.com/...
  - fault1 5y ago
    I agree, personally I think it's a problem with Julia's initial "product" placement, which was probably a overfocus on the "technical computing" aspect. Personally, the first version of python I used was 1.5.2 (in 1999). I learned it initially instead of the current 'scripting language' hegemon, which was perl. Since CGI was in extensive use at that time, this was the start of the python web backend ecosystem. In the late 2000s, I was able to sneak in Python rewrites of MATLAB or Fortran code written by scientists, even in situations where Python was not officially sanctioned for that type of work (I was mainly a C++ developer, but would also write python bindings). I feel like it really was the strength of python's strength as a universal ducktape that caused the ecosystem growth of both the scientific _and_ web stacks. Nowadays, I've really come to appreciate Julia from a novelty standpoint, and I'm intrigued at what it can do, especially in terms of probabilistic programming and other emerging fields, but in order to justify using Julia in more general 'professional programmer' settings, it needs to focus on what's made modern Python so successful. Otherwise, I could see it's fate as "merely" replacing a more niche language like MATLAB (which Python has /already/ managed to do for the most part).
  - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
    Julia has a decent amount of penetration in the private sector, just not in "tech". If you look at JuliaComputing's clients, you'll see a lot of private customers, they're just not the type that typically talks a lot about the tech they're using.

by fault1 5y ago

chaxor 5y ago

The way I see Julia now is how I saw python ~12 years ago

tfehring 5y ago
I agree, but it's probably closer to 20 years IMO, which makes sense given that Python has been around for 21 years longer. By 2009 Python was already in widespread use at Google/YouTube and (I think) Mozilla, plus startups like Reddit and Dropbox. Hell, Steve Huffman wrote "Lots of people have written web applications in Python, and there's plenty of code from which to learn" as one justification for Reddit's Python rewrite in 2005 [0]. No one is saying that about Julia today, it's seeing very little use in the private sector at this point. [0] http://web.archive.org/web/20051230163903/http://reddit.com/blog/2005/12/on-lisp.html http://web.archive.org/web/20051230163903/http://reddit.com/...
- fault1 5y ago
  I agree, personally I think it's a problem with Julia's initial "product" placement, which was probably a overfocus on the "technical computing" aspect. Personally, the first version of python I used was 1.5.2 (in 1999). I learned it initially instead of the current 'scripting language' hegemon, which was perl. Since CGI was in extensive use at that time, this was the start of the python web backend ecosystem. In the late 2000s, I was able to sneak in Python rewrites of MATLAB or Fortran code written by scientists, even in situations where Python was not officially sanctioned for that type of work (I was mainly a C++ developer, but would also write python bindings). I feel like it really was the strength of python's strength as a universal ducktape that caused the ecosystem growth of both the scientific _and_ web stacks. Nowadays, I've really come to appreciate Julia from a novelty standpoint, and I'm intrigued at what it can do, especially in terms of probabilistic programming and other emerging fields, but in order to justify using Julia in more general 'professional programmer' settings, it needs to focus on what's made modern Python so successful. Otherwise, I could see it's fate as "merely" replacing a more niche language like MATLAB (which Python has /already/ managed to do for the most part).
- adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
  Julia has a decent amount of penetration in the private sector, just not in "tech". If you look at JuliaComputing's clients, you'll see a lot of private customers, they're just not the type that typically talks a lot about the tech they're using.