Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mkborregaard 2843 days ago
An important thing that many people fail to realise is that Julia-1.0 came as a surprise to package authors as well, and thus the first month of the the release has been a scramble to get everything working on 1.0. Unfortunately the pre-1.0 package manager did not have good facilities for upper bounding versions - so essentially everybody's packages would install on 1.0 but be broken.

At exactly the same time, a lot of people thought "hey, 1.0 time to check out this new language", and would experience all those crashes.

Doing a review of Julia based on the experience in the first month after 1.0 will be grossly misleading. I've used the language progressively more for the last 3 years, and also teach a university R course, so I have some experience to base that claim on.

2 comments

> Doing a review of Julia based on the experience in the first month after 1.0 will be grossly misleading.

This is definitely a fair point and a main reason I am not rushing to judgment after trying Julia for just a few weeks. I like the language already, and fully realize there is a lot of hard work going on among package maintainers to adjust to 1.0. My main advice to anyone trying Julia is to take the long view. It's still very young so look past the rough edges to its potential.

Yes, the package situation seemed much better 6 months ago, on v0.6. Because so much changed in v0.7, it would (IMHO) have made sense to release 1.0 alongside v0.7.1 or something.

(But I guess there are various pressures, not to delay, too.)