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This article was pointed out to me, more than once now, as a user of Julia. However, I don't see that it has too much relevance to me as a user of the language, even if its quite outdated points were still valid today. I am part of a team that now has over 60,000 lines of Julia code in our computer algebra package(s), and the intersection between our experience as users and the points danluu made is almost nil. If one looks at the ranking of the language on Tiobe, it's quite obviously being used a lot for a language that hasn't even reached 1.0 yet. I think the issues one is likely to have with Julia as an evolving language have completely moved on from those made in danluu's article. In fact, it might be useful for someone to write a "constructive criticism" blog article about the state of affairs today. My personal opinion is that I would wait until 1.0 (which will arrive in less than 2 years time) if I were a fortune 500 company, unless you really need to be ahead of the game and are prepared to contribute to the development of the actual language itself. But for just about anything else, if you need the features Julia provides, it's probably vastly superior to the alternatives today. Our experience is you will occasionally have to adjust some of your code to handle changes to the language prior to 1.0, and we've had to do that a few times so far (at most a few hours work each 0.x point release, even with our large, complex code base). And this mainly applies if you are really pushing Julia hard and exploring interesting corners of the language. Other than this, its more than stable enough for serious work. |