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A few months back this article[0] was posted here (Why I no longer recommend Julia). Does anyone following the Julia community know if the situation is getting

A few months back this article[0] was posted here (Why I no longer recommend Julia). Does anyone following the Julia community know if the situation is getting better? [0] https://yuri.is/not-julia/ https://yuri.is/not-julia/

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jakobnissen 4y ago
In my view, yes, it's getting better, but only slowly. There has not been a decisive "let's fix this issue" moment. Recent releases have had longer cycles with more thorough testing. Julia's CI has expanded. Static analysis is improving. The linter is improving. That all adds together to a more stable Julia with fewer bugs. However, there has been made little progress on actually improving Julia's tests, or documenting abstract types, or on formalizing interfaces, nor have there been a big dedicated "fix bugs" push. So yes: It's getting better, but slowly and not yet by leaps and bounds.
jessfyi 4y ago
I mean if you go through them yourself and you'll see most (if not all) of those are closed. And the majority of the others dealt with composability issues between custom packages/libraries and not base Julia. Honestly it's a tooling + linter problem, and the lack of progress there (plus the general adversarial/celebratory tenor of that thread) made me pretty glad I've just moved onto Rust + python again. It's just too demoralizing from a dev's perspective to see. Don't get me wrong, I love multiple dispatch and Julia's composability + speed make it a no brainer for science/quant econ teams to adopt (and using it to train models on TPUs is a actually a sneaky way to save time + $), but they've lost the "culture" war and I can't see the entrenched masses here or elsewhere changing their minds on it. Not sure whether it's for job security sake or they got sick of all the "Julia is faster than/will replace X" evangelism or Plots loaded too slowly the one time they tried it years ago or a combination.
- nsajko 4y ago
  So you've decided to abandon a technology stack because of an unfavorable discussion thread on HN?
  - jessfyi 4y ago
    No, because of lack of progress in areas I care about. It's just a tool that currently doesn't fit my most crucial needs, so I picked up other tools. The discussion was further evidence of the reality that I'd already come to terms with; the lack of inroads in building a larger community and general ecosystem is partly because of a lack of focus on things like tooling, linting, documentation standards, etc and partly because of a weird amount of disdain for the language. I can help with the former, but I don't have the time or energy for the latter because it's actually a set of large, long-term marketing, organizational, and psychological problems to overcome. Maybe someday down the road I'll be back, but I've given it a shot for about 8-9 years now.
nsajko 4y ago
> Does anyone following the Julia community know if the situation is getting better? Which situation exactly? The linked article lacks a salient point, so there's really no way to know what you're referring to.
- Someone 4y ago
  IMO, it has a clear salient point: “My conclusion after using Julia for many years is that there are too many correctness and composability bugs throughout the ecosystem to justify using it in just about any context where correctness matters.”
- jakobnissen 4y ago
  I disagree with that completely, and I'm deep into the Julia community. The article is very, very clear that the author considers Julia's level of bugginess to be unacceptable.
moelf 4y ago
https://huijzer.xyz/posts/recommend/ https://huijzer.xyz/posts/recommend/

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jakobnissen 4y ago

In my view, yes, it's getting better, but only slowly. There has not been a decisive "let's fix this issue" moment. Recent releases have had longer cycles with more thorough testing. Julia's CI has expanded. Static analysis is improving. The linter is improving. That all adds together to a more stable Julia with fewer bugs. However, there has been made little progress on actually improving Julia's tests, or documenting abstract types, or on formalizing interfaces, nor have there been a big dedicated "fix bugs" push. So yes: It's getting better, but slowly and not yet by leaps and bounds.

jessfyi 4y ago

I mean if you go through them yourself and you'll see most (if not all) of those are closed. And the majority of the others dealt with composability issues between custom packages/libraries and not base Julia. Honestly it's a tooling + linter problem, and the lack of progress there (plus the general adversarial/celebratory tenor of that thread) made me pretty glad I've just moved onto Rust + python again. It's just too demoralizing from a dev's perspective to see. Don't get me wrong, I love multiple dispatch and Julia's composability + speed make it a no brainer for science/quant econ teams to adopt (and using it to train models on TPUs is a actually a sneaky way to save time + $), but they've lost the "culture" war and I can't see the entrenched masses here or elsewhere changing their minds on it. Not sure whether it's for job security sake or they got sick of all the "Julia is faster than/will replace X" evangelism or Plots loaded too slowly the one time they tried it years ago or a combination.

nsajko 4y ago
So you've decided to abandon a technology stack because of an unfavorable discussion thread on HN?
- jessfyi 4y ago
  No, because of lack of progress in areas I care about. It's just a tool that currently doesn't fit my most crucial needs, so I picked up other tools. The discussion was further evidence of the reality that I'd already come to terms with; the lack of inroads in building a larger community and general ecosystem is partly because of a lack of focus on things like tooling, linting, documentation standards, etc and partly because of a weird amount of disdain for the language. I can help with the former, but I don't have the time or energy for the latter because it's actually a set of large, long-term marketing, organizational, and psychological problems to overcome. Maybe someday down the road I'll be back, but I've given it a shot for about 8-9 years now.

nsajko 4y ago

> Does anyone following the Julia community know if the situation is getting better? Which situation exactly? The linked article lacks a salient point, so there's really no way to know what you're referring to.

Someone 4y ago
IMO, it has a clear salient point: “My conclusion after using Julia for many years is that there are too many correctness and composability bugs throughout the ecosystem to justify using it in just about any context where correctness matters.”
jakobnissen 4y ago
I disagree with that completely, and I'm deep into the Julia community. The article is very, very clear that the author considers Julia's level of bugginess to be unacceptable.

moelf 4y ago

https://huijzer.xyz/posts/recommend/ https://huijzer.xyz/posts/recommend/