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I think many people underestimate the inertia present in a large community, particularly one like scientific computing. I think Julia is much-much better than R

I think many people underestimate the inertia present in a large community, particularly one like scientific computing. I think Julia is much-much better than R/Python at basically everything important (as a language and platform). I certainly wouldn't call the python ecosystem robust. It's decades upon decades of ugly hacks and hacks upon hacks. The pandas internals are a Kafkaesque nightmare. But R/Python is where millions of people work daily and produce a huge amount of mindshare and libraries. You'd need an incredible amount of resources to replicate that in any other space. I'd argue though that this mindshare is not there due to Python/R as a language (and platform) being better, but simply because there were no better alternatives 10-15 years ago and by now the sheer inertia makes it impossible to stop. You'd need to convince a sufficient portion of people to move to Julia at more or less the same time. Few people want to be first movers. These tend to be the ones who actually care about the qualities of the platform, not just "get the work done and clock out". If you are a data scientist, you won't be paid for moving to Julia. You'll be paid for coming up with working models. And you take a serious risk by moving to a new platform with little adoption. The platform might die, taking your tools and processes with it. You won't be able to rely on your colleagues advice about technical issues. You can run into bugs more frequently simply because fewer eyes have looked at the ecosystem. The end result is that few people take the plunge.

jstx1 5y ago
I would outright disagree with this - data science and ML is a subfield of software where you have a much higher ratio of greenfield projects over the past decade, and you also have many people who are moving to the field or are starting out in it. It also attracts the kinds of people who will be willing to use cool tech just for the sake of it. If that's not conducive to picking a new programming language with lots of promises, I don't know what is. And they still aren't picking Julia.
- short_sells_poo 5y ago
  What do you disagree with if I may ask? Most of the people I work with really like Julia, we have dabbled with it and would like to see it succeed python/matlab/r. Why aren't we moving, you ask? Because moving to another ecosystem does not put bread on the table. I cannot go to clients and say: this past 6 months we made no improvements to our strategies, but look, we migrated to a new programming language that is used by a fraction of a percent of our peer group. The field attracts clever people and there are many greenfield projects. But just because we start a new project, it doesn't mean that doing it in a tiny ecosystem is sensible. Some firms can do it. Jane Street has the means to basically be "OCAML The Systematic Trading Language". This is not a luxury afforded to most. And thus we get a chicken and egg problem, where nobody wants to be the sole first mover as there's little advantage to it. At the same time, we all see that everyone would be much better off if we moved.
- deleted 5y ago
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jstx1 5y ago

I would outright disagree with this - data science and ML is a subfield of software where you have a much higher ratio of greenfield projects over the past decade, and you also have many people who are moving to the field or are starting out in it. It also attracts the kinds of people who will be willing to use cool tech just for the sake of it. If that's not conducive to picking a new programming language with lots of promises, I don't know what is. And they still aren't picking Julia.

short_sells_poo 5y ago
What do you disagree with if I may ask? Most of the people I work with really like Julia, we have dabbled with it and would like to see it succeed python/matlab/r. Why aren't we moving, you ask? Because moving to another ecosystem does not put bread on the table. I cannot go to clients and say: this past 6 months we made no improvements to our strategies, but look, we migrated to a new programming language that is used by a fraction of a percent of our peer group. The field attracts clever people and there are many greenfield projects. But just because we start a new project, it doesn't mean that doing it in a tiny ecosystem is sensible. Some firms can do it. Jane Street has the means to basically be "OCAML The Systematic Trading Language". This is not a luxury afforded to most. And thus we get a chicken and egg problem, where nobody wants to be the sole first mover as there's little advantage to it. At the same time, we all see that everyone would be much better off if we moved.
deleted 5y ago
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