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

  • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
    3·
    1 year ago

    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.

      • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
        1·
        1 year ago

        The only benefit Octave has over MATLAB is that it’s free. Which is something I guess, but in practice it is MATLAB without the benefits of MATLAB.

        It’s plotting functionality sucks as much as anything else, it has fairly good toolkit support but not remotely like MATLAB, and it still has the mediocre MATLAB language. Worse - with custom incompatible extensions!

  • Womble@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Why is everyone in this thread constantly putting meaningless @ mentions at the top of their replies?

    • TerrorBite@pawb.social
      0·
      1 year ago

      The thread was started as a toot by a Mastodon user. All of the replies are actually Mastodon posts. Thanks to the magic of the Fediverse, these render in Lemmy as comments.

      • eronth@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        As cool as that is, it does end up looking confusing. Maybe some quick visual indication (possibly customized by each user) to show source of comment could help.

  • Murat@fosstodon.org
    0·
    1 year ago

    @maegul @programming I had already switched to Python to solve the “Matlab problem”. I’ve been Julia-adjacent, looked at it with an open mind but it doesn’t make sense to switch to it when I can do almost everything I need in Python. A little diss here, just when we arrived at a free, available solution for widely available sci/biz programming envrionment (Python) Julia peeled off some whose code becomes unusable for most consumers of code.

  • mvirts@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 year ago

    Python was first released in 1991, Julia in 2012. I think it may be too soon to call the race.