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If Julia gets to where it wants to be, pretty soon there will be tasks for which there is no practical alternative to Julia. At this point, people will be in so

If Julia gets to where it wants to be, pretty soon there will be tasks for which there is no practical alternative to Julia. At this point, people will be in some sense forced to use it, and the floodgates of hate will open (see javascript, matlab, cmake, cpp). Maybe this is the warning trickle?

culi 4y ago
You're describing the current state of Python. Julia is kind of a response to Python. Python's become the de facto for ML and dataviz. Two things it's kind of a terrible tool for I'm sure people will become more critical of Julia if it successfully becomes the de facto for those things but there's a big difference in that Julia is very focused on those things whereas Python is trying to be as general purpose as possible
- culi 4y ago
  Tangent, but tbh I really don't see what the future of Python is. I don't understand why we don't just teach JS or TS as a starting language. It has about as much baggage and is about as easy to understand as Python and is the only language with a comparable ecosystem. Plus you also get to learn the language of the web for free. And now that you have stuff like deno that can run typescript without any messy dependencies. You can just make a quick ts file and write your webscraper or proof of concept and run it in the terminal. At least personally, that replaces my primary use-case for Python and I get to take advantage of TS's amazing type system which really comes in handy when dealing with external APIs. I really don't see a place for Python ml --> Julia, C++, R dataviz --> R, JS/TS beginner-friendly --> JS web --> JS want a backend framework but wanna choose a language that's easy to hire for --> TS, Ruby huge, stable community --> JS/TS quick scripts --> Deno systems --> Rust, C++, Java, Go I'd say it still dominates in scripting/webscraping and creating shareable work (e.g. Jupyter), but I'm just pointing out that at this point it's replaceable in those areas
  - veqq 4y ago
    > I really don't see a place for Python I agree. Around 2008, I was drunk on "the zen of Python", considering myself a Pythonista, writing elegant solutions, making unmaintainable one liners etc. But really Lisp was so much better for that power/speed of development. Eventually (for me) go was so much more powerful, easy to maintain etc. with actual industry usage (seemingly instantly) without any loss in productivity. Python solutions seem no better than maligned JS solutions nowadays - but at least there's TS and efforts to improve it where they can. Indeed, most Python code doesn't seem to be in proper production, but just one of exploratory scripts and pieces strewn about in notebooks. It seems like it could easily lose market share quite quickly.
  - xigoi 4y ago
    You're calling the community that makes a new framework every nanosecond “stable”?
    - mardifoufs 4y ago
      More stable than python that's for sure. You could just go with react or node (depending on your use case) , pick a build tool, and be set for half a decade. That's absolutely not the case with Python, and I'm not just talking about the breaking changes that happen in some releases. You also don't get a mess of venv, conda environments, incompatible packages, having to use docker to deploy your app, etc. I use Python a lot, and I like it, but Javascript is much more stable as a platform for quite a lot of what python is generally used for.
    - culi 4y ago
      JS is more tightly bound as the "language of the web" than Python is bound as "the language of data science". That's all I'm saying really. I would bet more money that JS is here 15 years from now than that Python is
      - tomrod 4y ago
        I think WASM will upend some of this.
- lmm 4y ago
  > I'm sure people will become more critical of Julia if it successfully becomes the de facto for those things but there's a big difference in that Julia is very focused on those things whereas Python is trying to be as general purpose as possible I see that as more of a point in Python's favour than Julia's. IME languages that are designed as general-purpose languages tend to be better than languages that are designed for niche purposes, even within those niches. The things that make a language good require consistent, general thinking.
  - culi 4y ago
    Right but Julia is specifically built against the criticisms made about Python in those spaces. All I'm saying is within that space there's gonna be less to critique
  - NicolasL-S 4y ago
    > IME languages that are designed as general-purpose languages tend to be better than languages that are designed for niche purposes, even within those niches. The things that make a language good require consistent, general thinking. Julia is a general purpose language, while being the best tool for scientific computing.
    - lmm 4y ago
      As a general purpose language it seems very limited/immature, if you look at trying to run e.g. a http server in it.

culi 4y ago

You're describing the current state of Python. Julia is kind of a response to Python. Python's become the de facto for ML and dataviz. Two things it's kind of a terrible tool for I'm sure people will become more critical of Julia if it successfully becomes the de facto for those things but there's a big difference in that Julia is very focused on those things whereas Python is trying to be as general purpose as possible

culi 4y ago
Tangent, but tbh I really don't see what the future of Python is. I don't understand why we don't just teach JS or TS as a starting language. It has about as much baggage and is about as easy to understand as Python and is the only language with a comparable ecosystem. Plus you also get to learn the language of the web for free. And now that you have stuff like deno that can run typescript without any messy dependencies. You can just make a quick ts file and write your webscraper or proof of concept and run it in the terminal. At least personally, that replaces my primary use-case for Python and I get to take advantage of TS's amazing type system which really comes in handy when dealing with external APIs. I really don't see a place for Python ml --> Julia, C++, R dataviz --> R, JS/TS beginner-friendly --> JS web --> JS want a backend framework but wanna choose a language that's easy to hire for --> TS, Ruby huge, stable community --> JS/TS quick scripts --> Deno systems --> Rust, C++, Java, Go I'd say it still dominates in scripting/webscraping and creating shareable work (e.g. Jupyter), but I'm just pointing out that at this point it's replaceable in those areas
- veqq 4y ago
  > I really don't see a place for Python I agree. Around 2008, I was drunk on "the zen of Python", considering myself a Pythonista, writing elegant solutions, making unmaintainable one liners etc. But really Lisp was so much better for that power/speed of development. Eventually (for me) go was so much more powerful, easy to maintain etc. with actual industry usage (seemingly instantly) without any loss in productivity. Python solutions seem no better than maligned JS solutions nowadays - but at least there's TS and efforts to improve it where they can. Indeed, most Python code doesn't seem to be in proper production, but just one of exploratory scripts and pieces strewn about in notebooks. It seems like it could easily lose market share quite quickly.
- xigoi 4y ago
  You're calling the community that makes a new framework every nanosecond “stable”?
  - mardifoufs 4y ago
    More stable than python that's for sure. You could just go with react or node (depending on your use case) , pick a build tool, and be set for half a decade. That's absolutely not the case with Python, and I'm not just talking about the breaking changes that happen in some releases. You also don't get a mess of venv, conda environments, incompatible packages, having to use docker to deploy your app, etc. I use Python a lot, and I like it, but Javascript is much more stable as a platform for quite a lot of what python is generally used for.
  - culi 4y ago
    JS is more tightly bound as the "language of the web" than Python is bound as "the language of data science". That's all I'm saying really. I would bet more money that JS is here 15 years from now than that Python is
    - tomrod 4y ago
      I think WASM will upend some of this.
lmm 4y ago
> I'm sure people will become more critical of Julia if it successfully becomes the de facto for those things but there's a big difference in that Julia is very focused on those things whereas Python is trying to be as general purpose as possible I see that as more of a point in Python's favour than Julia's. IME languages that are designed as general-purpose languages tend to be better than languages that are designed for niche purposes, even within those niches. The things that make a language good require consistent, general thinking.
- culi 4y ago
  Right but Julia is specifically built against the criticisms made about Python in those spaces. All I'm saying is within that space there's gonna be less to critique
- NicolasL-S 4y ago
  > IME languages that are designed as general-purpose languages tend to be better than languages that are designed for niche purposes, even within those niches. The things that make a language good require consistent, general thinking. Julia is a general purpose language, while being the best tool for scientific computing.
  - lmm 4y ago
    As a general purpose language it seems very limited/immature, if you look at trying to run e.g. a http server in it.