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This is an example of cherry picking the facts for marketing at best and an extremely disingenuous blog post at worst. Julia is no where on the map in almost e

This is an example of cherry picking the facts for marketing at best and an extremely disingenuous blog post at worst. Julia is no where on the map in almost every metric (no commonly used libraries, no web frameworks, etc), and even in the other metrics where Julia is listed it is WAAAAYYY down there. Below Lua. Below Haskell. It is even below MATLAB. If that's not a scathing indictment of Julia, I don't know what is. Even in the "most loved" category, if you look at all the respondents who "want" to use Julia, it is no where near the top. I know Logan is the community advocate for Julia, but picking just the one slice of data where Julia looks appealing and blogging about just that is very off-putting. If anything, this survey should be a call for introspection or reflection, on what and why Julia is not taking off despite people loving the language. Or a well-rounded blog post on the various metrics where Julia is listed would be much more appreciated. In fact, a blog post on what the plans are to solve static compilation, making first time to plot better, building better tooling, features planned for Julia 2.0 would be much more appreciated than this kind of shameless advertising.

krastanov 4y ago
Blog posts (and especially public forum posts and github issue discussions) on the topics you care about are quite common. It seems very normal and unsurprising that a community advocate would cheerlead survey results like this and let others discuss the topics you mentioned (and they do). I am also surprised by your "scathing indictment" comment. Julia released its first stable version 3 years ago. MATLAB/R/Haskell have existed for decades. Julia has 30% of the user-share of MATLAB (and same order of magnitude comparisons to R and Haskell). This seems like a pretty big achievement already, especially when you see where these other languages are on the "love" scale. Don't get me wrong, there is plenty that needs to further be fixed with Julia, but it is pretty easy to see that there is serious progress on all these tasks when you look at their forum and github. For a language conceived 10 years ago and having its first stable release 3 years ago, this seems quite amazing to me.
- blindseer 4y ago
  > It seems very normal and unsurprising that a community advocate would cheerlead survey results like this and let others discuss the topics you mentioned (and they do). Maybe I find it a little tone deaf. As someone that has been using Julia for a long time and still seen very little growth in the language (compared to Rust for example), and sees users on a regular basis complain about basic issues in Julia (tooling being the biggest one for me), I find it off-putting and evangelizing when prominent community members blatantly disregard information counter to the narrative they want to establish. I hold Logan to a much higher standard, and the tone in the blog post rubbed me the wrong way. Even on Slack, there's a discussion of how "little" Julia is in this survey, and for the public messaging to be different from what a lot of users are voicing feels off. I do feel my comment was a stronger reaction, but it was perhaps stemming from my frustrations after seeing the survey, seeing it discussed on slack, seeing it discussed at work, and then reading this post. > I am also surprised by your "scathing indictment" comment. Julia released its first stable version 3 years ago. MATLAB/R/Haskell have existed for decades. Julia has 30% of the user-share of MATLAB (and same order of magnitude comparisons to R and Haskell). This seems like a pretty big achievement already, especially when you see where these other languages are on the "love" scale. Perhaps. Maybe I was too strong here. Julia has come a long way, and I absolutely love using it over MATLAB. But scientists and researchers are still picking MATLAB over Julia today, and that is extremely troubling for the future of the language. People are dreaming that Julia will eat Python's lunch when Julia seems like it is barely catching up to MATLAB. I think Julia will get there eventually. But maybe I need to adjust my expectations. I previously was hopeful that after Julia 1.0, adoption would skyrocket. It did increase, but not to the extent that I would have liked. After Julia 1.6, I was hopeful again. But I think I just need to temper my expectations. Maybe after like 10 years it might be a popular language, but right now it feels like it is such an extremely niche language, and that personally hurts that I've sunk so much time and effort into it.

krastanov 4y ago

Blog posts (and especially public forum posts and github issue discussions) on the topics you care about are quite common. It seems very normal and unsurprising that a community advocate would cheerlead survey results like this and let others discuss the topics you mentioned (and they do). I am also surprised by your "scathing indictment" comment. Julia released its first stable version 3 years ago. MATLAB/R/Haskell have existed for decades. Julia has 30% of the user-share of MATLAB (and same order of magnitude comparisons to R and Haskell). This seems like a pretty big achievement already, especially when you see where these other languages are on the "love" scale. Don't get me wrong, there is plenty that needs to further be fixed with Julia, but it is pretty easy to see that there is serious progress on all these tasks when you look at their forum and github. For a language conceived 10 years ago and having its first stable release 3 years ago, this seems quite amazing to me.

blindseer 4y ago
> It seems very normal and unsurprising that a community advocate would cheerlead survey results like this and let others discuss the topics you mentioned (and they do). Maybe I find it a little tone deaf. As someone that has been using Julia for a long time and still seen very little growth in the language (compared to Rust for example), and sees users on a regular basis complain about basic issues in Julia (tooling being the biggest one for me), I find it off-putting and evangelizing when prominent community members blatantly disregard information counter to the narrative they want to establish. I hold Logan to a much higher standard, and the tone in the blog post rubbed me the wrong way. Even on Slack, there's a discussion of how "little" Julia is in this survey, and for the public messaging to be different from what a lot of users are voicing feels off. I do feel my comment was a stronger reaction, but it was perhaps stemming from my frustrations after seeing the survey, seeing it discussed on slack, seeing it discussed at work, and then reading this post. > I am also surprised by your "scathing indictment" comment. Julia released its first stable version 3 years ago. MATLAB/R/Haskell have existed for decades. Julia has 30% of the user-share of MATLAB (and same order of magnitude comparisons to R and Haskell). This seems like a pretty big achievement already, especially when you see where these other languages are on the "love" scale. Perhaps. Maybe I was too strong here. Julia has come a long way, and I absolutely love using it over MATLAB. But scientists and researchers are still picking MATLAB over Julia today, and that is extremely troubling for the future of the language. People are dreaming that Julia will eat Python's lunch when Julia seems like it is barely catching up to MATLAB. I think Julia will get there eventually. But maybe I need to adjust my expectations. I previously was hopeful that after Julia 1.0, adoption would skyrocket. It did increase, but not to the extent that I would have liked. After Julia 1.6, I was hopeful again. But I think I just need to temper my expectations. Maybe after like 10 years it might be a popular language, but right now it feels like it is such an extremely niche language, and that personally hurts that I've sunk so much time and effort into it.