Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by krastanov 2518 days ago
In terms of "canonical ways" and "community approved libraries" here is what the current state looks like to me:

- as a substitute to something as low-level as numpy it is superb

- for anything dealing with differential equations, the ecosystem is unsurpassed

- plotting is a bit chaotic (and the community has not settled on a "one true way to plot")

- a good dataframe implementation already exists

- serialization is a bit chaotic (plenty of ways to do it but no "one true way" yet)

- automatic differentiation is on the cusp of being unsurpassed, but a lot of the tools are still experimental (and the community still has not settled on the best way forward)

- the Juno IDE looks amazing

- the profiling toolkit is amazing

- it is ridiculously easy to use other languages from within Julia

2 comments

Agreed on all points, but you will pay for all this with usability issues and early adopter bugs. The error messages are horrendous, documentation is lacking, and if you run code on hpc, saving the data is probably going to cause you dataloss at least a few times until you find the right obscure GitHub issues.
This is my experience, hopefully now that 1.x is home and dry we will gradually see the pain of old libraries suddenly failing ebb away, and documentation becoming more co-herant and accurate. Also thanks for calling out the error messages - this has been something I've struggled with and needs some careful attention from the Julia community.

On the otherhand our expectations are huge - I remember early Java and the level of support that you get with Julia now really took a very long time to appear for Java, and that was backed by SUN.

If I were an Intel exec I'd be putting money into this though; I can see it gradually crushing the life out of nVidia and AMD, although I think that there will be a few smiles at ARM towers when they look at this too! I wonder what people could do with 2000 ARM cores in a rack?

I would add:

- Good integrated test system (and test culture in the community)

- Super good package/environment manager

- Great integrated documentation system

- Good version control practices in the community

- Awesome community