this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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Did #julialang end up kinda stalling or at least plateau-ing lower than hoped?

I know it's got its community and dedicated users and has continued development.

But without being in that space, and speculating now at a distance, it seems it might be an interesting case study in a tech/lang that just didn't have landing spot it could arrive at in time as the tech-world & "data science" reshuffled while julia tried to grow ... ?

Can a language ever solve a "two language" problem?

@programming

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[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (3 children)

IMO Julia just had way too many big issues to gain critical mass:

  1. Copied 1-based indexing from MATLAB. Why? We've known that's the worse option for decades.

  2. For ages it had extremely slow startup times. I think because it compiles everything from C, but even cached it would take like 20s to load the plotting library. You can start MATLAB several times in that time. I believe they improved this fairly recently but they clearly got the runtime/compile time balance completely wrong for a research language.

  3. There's an article somewhere from someone who was really on board with Julia about all the issues that made them leave.

I still feel like there's space for a MATLAB replacement... Hopefully someone will give it a better attempt at some point.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

@FizzyOrange

Yea I remember reading about some deeper issues with the language (Dan Luu was quite dark on it I think) and that more or less turned me off. At the time I would have had to have been amongst some dedicated users urging me on to consider adoption.

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