tl;dr: Julia is a great idea, but with poor testing and quality control. Community is (apparently) a bunch of dicks.
Just to be clear, I don't personally have much experience with it, I'm just summarizing Dan's review.
This is not true at all. I personally know some of the core devs, they are very sharp programmers and very humble people. The community is very open to suggestions, and very welcoming to new people.
Yes, just my personal experience, and I'm not claiming that no one ever had a bad experience, but I didn't want to let that pass unchallenged.
There have been major improvements in the past three years and code coverage is now consistently above 80%.
> Community is (apparently) a bunch of ...
I'm admittedly biased, but based on a number of years of experience and personal efforts, I think this is not a fair characterization. I don't know what happened in that private forum -- but I do know that the Julia community is thousands of people, with a huge, public archive of helpful, respectful interactions among newbies, non-Julia experts, core devs, and everyone in between.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/julia-users
(Disclosure: Julia committer)
Anyhow, the community never seems standoffish or "dickish" to me. I've had good responses, despite disagreeing on a few PR requests.
I would say there is still a bit of a quality control issue but it's still a young project. Hopefully the new funding and commercial support will help pay for better QC. Not many of the core team appear to have done much in the way of "plain old software development" so the community lacks a bit of learning from applying things in industry. Likely the ongoing experience with Julia and the various support contracts will shore that up quickly. :-) For example, there was a (defunct) startup Staffjoy doing schedule optimization using Julia and their write up was that little things like dropping literal Dict syntax was a huge pain for their test code [1].
[1]: https://blog.staffjoy.com/retro-on-the-julia-programming-lan...
Not everyone (most are kind and welcoming), but yeah that has been my experience as well with some members.
https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/release-0.6/NEWS.md#...
Likewise Rust is like this for the language. Their standard library iirc were still developing?
So it suck in term of wanting something stable but at the same time they need people using their language.
I think the upside is there are tons of stuff you can contributes including the small stuff.
Of course the standard library changes; it's not a dead language.
New features, including new functions in the standard library, are marked 'unstable' when they are introduced. Unstable features have to be explicitly requested, indicating that the programmer is aware that their functionality may change before they're stabilized.
[1]: The other day I did spend some time figuring out how to do Pkg.add("SQLite").
I used to think that but changed my mind when it comes to programming languages. Mainly because once complexity is there, unless it's just a single developer or very tightly controlled / peer reviewed development practice, different contributors will use various subsets of features of the language and so you still have to know all the complex edge cases because you might have to read code. And arguably code is read more than written.
https://hackernoon.com/deconstructing-the-near-perfect-deal-...
Have they been addressed by now?
