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It isn't inevitable, but some people promoting Julia like to pretend that there is some sort of competition for mindshare happening. There are three basic marke
by evgen 4y ago
It isn't inevitable, but some people promoting Julia like to pretend that there is some sort of competition for mindshare happening. There are three basic markets for numerical computing: hobbyist, academic, and commercial. The hobbyists will always remain in Python because it is good enough and there is little benefit to learning a new language for casual numerical computing (this also applies to undergrad-level academics, which is closer to hobbyists than deep academics.) In academics it is possible that Julia will replace R for a lot of use cases, but it is unlikely to make much progress in displacing Python outside of math-heavy fields: a biologist or chemist will stay with Python because of the ecosystem and its applications outside of pure numerical processing code. In the commercial world the race is already over and Python won, it will continue to grow in this role due to simple inertia and because for cases where numerical computation speed actually matters a company can hire people to write the code in something even faster and more efficient than Julia.
- noiwillnot 4y ago> Is possible that Julia will replace R for a lot of use cases R is a interactive statistical programming language that acts as a frontend for more performance languages. AFAIK interactivity is not the strongest points of Julia at the moment.
- MontyCarloHall 4y ago>interactivity is not the strongest points of Julia at the moment Not sure what you mean. Julia has the exact same notebook environment (Jupyter) as R and Python. Fun fact: the “Ju” in Jupyter stands for “Julia” (the “pyt” and “r” stand for what you think).
- noiwillnot 4y agoFew people in the R world use Jupyter environment, they are generally inferior to use the Rstudio environment. This might change in the future though, VSCode and DataSpell are becoming really good. Jupyter Labs are slowly improving too.
- markkitti 4y agoJulia has some excellent interactive front ends. For example, take a look at the reactive Julia notebook, Pluto.jl: https://plutojl.org/plutocon2021 https://plutojl.org/plutocon2021
- dabmlfz 4y agoI am not sure I agree with your hobbyist point. I do programming as a hobby, and I'd prefer doing it in Julia over Python anytime. I can understand that commercially you wouldn't risk adopting a new programming language like Julia when Python has a bigger mainstream ecosystem with solutions for most problems people have ran into, but for hobby I do not have these constraints; I have much more fun programming in a cleaner and more modern language like Julia withstanding its other benefits.