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I don’t think “mathematicians” is the right category. More like scientists/engineers who would otherwise use Fortran and Matlab (both have 1 based indexing) to

I don’t think “mathematicians” is the right category. More like scientists/engineers who would otherwise use Fortran and Matlab (both have 1 based indexing) to do number crunching. That’s actually a lot of people though writing quite a bit of code. It’s just they just don’t work in the software industry, and usually for them the code is not the work product. I think the aspiration was to provide something that a Matlab user can immediately pick up, that is almost as fast natively as Fortran, that also provides features to do good modern software engineering if you want to. And it succeeds amazingly at this. In my own view, adoption has not been wider because 1) most people don’t need speed so the trade offs with the compiler + using a weird language aren’t worth it, and more importantly 2) outside of some incredible software gems, the package ecosystem tends to be flaky and maintained by overworked academics in their spare time.

echelon 3y ago
> outside of some incredible software gems, the package ecosystem tends to be flaky and maintained by overworked academics in their spare time. That was the point I was trying to make. This language is too esoteric and leafy for most hackers / engineers / enthusiasts to spend their spare time building support packages. They'll pick up something like Nim or Rust as a new language before they'll look at Julia. By catering to mathematicians, scientists, and engineers, the broader population of software folks were excluded. Or, if "excluded" is too harsh, they at least weren't incentivized. Because of this, the best parsers, serializers, protocol implementations, scrapers, web servers, and other assortment of important technologies get written in other languages instead.
- currymj 3y ago
  I think you are right about this -- I just wanted to draw the distinction between mathematicians and the much larger population of scientists/engineers, who really do write a lot of code which is in its way "serious computing" even if it doesn't deal with any of the concerns and practices of "good software engineering". (I also think Julia would be okay with the current level of support for the "computer sciencey" technologies you describe like parser and web servers and so on -- it's pretty good at calling out to C or C++ if needed. But even many of the scientific/numerical packages don't have the maintenance resources they really need, so are often "good but flaky". This situation does seem to be slowly improving though.)

echelon 3y ago

> outside of some incredible software gems, the package ecosystem tends to be flaky and maintained by overworked academics in their spare time. That was the point I was trying to make. This language is too esoteric and leafy for most hackers / engineers / enthusiasts to spend their spare time building support packages. They'll pick up something like Nim or Rust as a new language before they'll look at Julia. By catering to mathematicians, scientists, and engineers, the broader population of software folks were excluded. Or, if "excluded" is too harsh, they at least weren't incentivized. Because of this, the best parsers, serializers, protocol implementations, scrapers, web servers, and other assortment of important technologies get written in other languages instead.

currymj 3y ago
I think you are right about this -- I just wanted to draw the distinction between mathematicians and the much larger population of scientists/engineers, who really do write a lot of code which is in its way "serious computing" even if it doesn't deal with any of the concerns and practices of "good software engineering". (I also think Julia would be okay with the current level of support for the "computer sciencey" technologies you describe like parser and web servers and so on -- it's pretty good at calling out to C or C++ if needed. But even many of the scientific/numerical packages don't have the maintenance resources they really need, so are often "good but flaky". This situation does seem to be slowly improving though.)