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by johnsea 2868 days ago
> Just in the last few months BinDeps was broken ...

What I don't understand is why you didn't just stay with old stable versions? You wouldn't be exposed to such issues, wouldn't you?

> It's not a development culture I would rely on when products and money and jobs are at stake

On the other hand this 'development culture' has brought brilliant results in a relatively short amount of time with a relatively small team.

There was a talk [1] at the Juliacon 2018 where a company very successfully replaced an IBM product with Julia code. At 48:07 there was a question 'about problems with changes in Julia'. Answer: they started with v0.3 and 'didn't really have many problems'. They 'didn't use anything particularly exotic'. So, yes, I'd say if you adapt to the given situation it can (could have) work(ed).

I'm not convinced that a non-cowboy style would have been better. (And besides, this doesn't come free moneywise).

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__gMirBBNXY

1 comments

These incidents were with respect to 0.6-supporting versions of packages. Pinning is a good idea for reproducability but it's not the default, so updating packages or new installs are broken when careless things make it instantly into a release.

Talk to me when google, amazon, microsoft, facebook etc are publicly using and officially supporting julia on cloud platforms or even infrastructure libraries like protobuf.

The carelessness isn't responsible for or helping anything. A good diffeq and optimization suite have been built despite the prevalence of careless practices, not because of them.

It's not a question of money either, just patience and code review and recognition of how many things downstream are going to be affected by mistakes. You'll save more time in not having to put out as many fires than it will cost to slow down and not be in such a rush at all times.