[ChrisFoster]

I'm an enthusiastic julia user, observer and very minor contributor. IMO a lot of the issues in this constructive rant have been addressed to some extent. For context, here's the previous HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8809422

Going through the post in order:

The stable releases still have some bugs as you would expect in a young language, but 0.4 is now well below my tolerance level. For a rough idea, I now use julia daily and encounter a bug perhaps once every one or two weeks. In 0.4 I haven't encountered any bug which was a real show stopper and couldn't easily be worked around.

Testing has gotten a whole heap nicer with a decent test framework in Base (accessible in 0.4 via BaseTestNext.jl). Testing and package manager integrate in a simple but effective way which really makes the friction for writing a suite of tests for new packages very low, much lower than other languages I've used. I can't speak for actual coverage in Base, but I know it's now actually being measured and work has gone into the coverage tools.

I'm going to skip over the complaints about error handling, because others have already responded to this, for example StefanKarpinski's post to the julia-users list https://groups.google.com/d/msg/julia-users/GyH8nhExY9I/0Bzn...

Consistent benchmarking is currently being addressed, with great work going on at BenchmarkTrackers.jl, and a proper setup with dedicated benchmarking hardware for the language itself. I don't have the depth of knowledge to comment on Dan's other complaints regarding skewed benchmarking.

Regarding contributing, my experience is that contributions to Base and the runtime by unknowns (myself, say) are generally met with the fair skepticism and good taste that all good maintainers should display. Sometimes I feel the core devs could do more to encourage new contributors, and the environment can feel slightly hostile when suggesting new features. I'm not sure how to entirely avoid this, when a core job of a good maintainer is to say "no" to a lot of poorly considered requests! Much of the code in Base is still commented in a minimalistic fashion, if at all. In contrast my experience in contributing to packages has been almost entirely positive, with a lot of excitement and energy leading to some really great code and interactions.

With precompliation, slow package load times have really been improved to the extent that they're no longer a major hassle, but there's still room for improvement here.

The real sting in the tail of this blog post is the paragraph about nastiness in the community. There was a couple of unfortunately worded (though not unambiguously malicious) mails on the julia-users list following Dan's post, but the discussion was largely constructive and helpful. I've no idea about the "private and semi-private communications" and I can only hope things were patched up there.

Overall I've found the julia experience almost entirely positive. It's a joy to work with for numerical and statistical problems, and we're moving forward at work to get our first major pieces of julia code into production.

[StefanKarpinski]

> I've no idea about the "private and semi-private communications" and I can only hope things were patched up there.

I'm the co-creator that Dan was talking about. He wrote a bunch of less-than-charitable comments on the aforementioned semi-private forum – not specifically to me, but where he surely knew I would read them – to which I responded with:

https://gist.github.com/StefanKarpinski/c72219ff8ce261172b11

You can judge for yourself whether I was nasty or dishonest. Things were, unfortunately, not patched up. Dan posted a number of responses, deleted all of them before I could read them, then left the conversation permanently.

[nickpsecurity]

Luu's claims made me hold off on pushing people to contribute to Julia as I waited for corroboration (or refutation) of them. I appreciate you linking to that very fair post that replies to it. The contrast between how the two of your present your claims adds credibility to yours. I also got a great laugh out of part about one guy that barely speaks English using the project as a personal Stackoverflow. A problem I'd have not anticipated starting a language/compiler project haha.

Curious, are you all still coding the internals of the compiler in femtolisp, is most of it written in Julia indirectly relying on that, or no LISP now? A barrier to entry question basically.

[StefanKarpinski]

The parser and some lowering passes are still written in femtolisp. There has been some discussion of switching to the native JuliaParser package [1]. However, JuliaParser doesn't implement the fairly tricky lowering passes that the femtolisp parser does. I personally would prefer to have the parser in Julia, but at this point the most pressing issue with parsing and lowering is speed – so it's possible that the parsing and lowering will be converted to C instead.

[1] https://github.com/JuliaLang/JuliaParser.jl

[nickpsecurity]

Thanks for the update. Decent plan. An alternative would be to code it in SPARK Ada for speed and correctness. Has side benefit that each component done that way won't be touched by halfassed developers because they lack the will to learn it. Not quick n dirty enough for them. ;)

[vanderZwan]

> I personally would prefer to have the parser in Julia, but at this point the most pressing issue with parsing and lowering is speed – so it's possible that the parsing and lowering will be converted to C instead.

But isn't Julia supposed to be fast? ;)

[nickpsecurity]

And this is just a parser. Nothing too fancy. Analysis should be able to produce some efficient code for one.

[ChrisFoster]

Thanks for the link. After reading the extra context Dan's comment about the community is only more baffling than before. To me your response seems about as measured and straight forwardly honest as it could be, with a double dose of constructive investigation on the purely technical matters.

[kgabis]

Thanks for the lengthy response!