Can I trouble you to make a post either on discourse or on the slack? I'd really like this to get in front of the broader julia community and core devs, and you're the best person to do that. Maybe there's a solution of which I'm unaware....or there could be some design discussions to come out of this.
https://julialang.org/community/ (slack and discourse link)
To be 100% honest with you, there's pretty much 0% chance of me adopting Julia in the next 12 months. I evaluated it before embarking on my current project, but ended up going with Python, and now I have several thousand lines of Python code that work fine, and I'm not going to rewrite it all in the near future. At some point in the medium term, I'll re-evaluate Julia. But until then, I don't want to lead anyone on any wild goose chase. Even if you solved this problem, and all my problems, I'm just not in a position to switch right now. So for that reason I think I'll hold off on issuing a community wide call for help. But I'm cautiously optimistic that at some point in the future I'll be writing Julia professionally.
A lot of this is also probably cultural rather than language features. The first thing they teach any Python data science boot camp initiate is: never "from numpy import *", always "import numpy as np" and yet in Julia "using" appears more common than "import"...
I also wouldn't read too much into my one example. It was initially meant just as an illustrative point, but somehow I was so bad at explaining it that it took tons of comments for me to get my minor point across. I do think the MLJ guys are properly on the right track, and that should work fine for most people who don't mind Macros. Maybe I'm in the minority in hating Macros.
The more commonly cited issues around compile time caching, tooling, etc. are boring to list off yet again, but probably the right areas of focus for the community, in terms of both impact and ease of implementation.
More generally, I really do think you're better off talking to people like @systemvoltage, who have actually given Julia more of a chance than I have. If I worked for Julia Computing I'd be reaching out to him and begging to get his brain dump on all the challenges he faced. In any business, it's always easier to reduce churn and learn from your (unhappy) customers, then it is to convert new prospects, whether that business is programming languages or investment banking.
Best of luck. Sincerely.
