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0 pointssystemvoltage4y ago0 comments

I’m a tortured soul, my opinions might be biased and I hope things improve with Julia.

We absolutely cannot upgrade Julia version right now, dozens of repos full of complicated scientific code. Management doesn’t care as far as it barely runs. I don’t think it’s fair to blame Julia for it but it just shows how much more it needs to go. That should be looked at as a positive thing.

I have one more complain to Julia community - please don’t be too defensive. Accept and embrace criticisms and turn that into a propellant for improving the language. I’ve seen a cult-like behavior in Julia community that is borderline toxic. Sorry, it’s the truth and needs to be said. Speed isn’t everything and people are magnetized by the benchmarks on the Julia website, especially non-software engineers.

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amkkma4y ago

>I’ve seen a cult-like behavior in Julia community that is borderline toxic. Sorry, it’s the truth and needs to be said. Speed isn’t everything and people are magnetized by the benchmarks on the Julia website, especially non-software engineers.

I think all languages have this dynamic...I've seen it with python and R. To some extent it's fed by what we perceive as criticisms from people defending their favorite incumbent language with arguments that aren't at all informed- such as a focus on speed and how numba achieves parity there.

In the same vein, I and many Julia users are enthusiastic precisely because of thing other than speed, such as the type system, abstractions, differentiability and other things that make programming more joyful, fluid and productive.

Agree though, that we could always improve on acceptance of criticism.

systemvoltageOP4y ago

Agreed and thanks for being charitable for the Julia community. It’s an interesting thing to balance: push and market the language, navigate haters and naysayers while also deeply respecting feedback and criticisms. We can all do better.

leephillips4y ago

Well you’re right about the libraries—Python really does have everything (although sometimes those libraries are not great quality, but at least they mostly work). But Julia makes it easy to use Python libraries with Pycall. And there are big things that just don’t exist yet in the Julia world, such as a web framework. I recently tried to create a web project using Genie.jl, which advertises itself as a ready-for-prime-time web framework for Julia, and I gave up after a few days. It’s just not in the same universe as something like Django, plus it’s barely documented.

freemint4y ago

Have you made the Genie maintenainers aware of your problems?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse