[nur0n]

There was a huge discussion shortly after Julia 1.0 was released regarding scoping [1]. Beginners intuitively think of scoping in a manner different from the way scoping should work in production projects. There was a lot of tension between seasoned programmers and educators (who had to constantly interact with beginners).

The community exhausted the entire design space (along with some full-blown prototypes). Eventually, the core Julia team chose to use more forgiving scoping in the REPL (virtually always the first point of contact for beginners), while actual projects enforced stricter scoping rules.

My key take-away is to consider how the language interacts with its ecosystem, not just how it should ideally operate in isolation. I have found the Julia team to be consistent in this pursuit. If the first point of contact is intractable for beginners, the project is dead on arrival. A technical tool should be tailored for experts, but you don't want to kill adoption along the way. Engineering is tradeoffs.

This article goes more in depth along the same lines: https://pchiusano.github.io/2016-02-25/tech-adoption.html

[1] https://discourse.julialang.org/t/another-possible-solution-...

[st1x7]

I understand there's a larger point being made here but I wouldn't give the decision that the Julia team made about scoping as an example of how to design a language. It makes the language inconsistent and now both beginners and experienced developers have to learn an exception instead of one group having to learn a slightly novel approach to scoping.

[google234123]

Allowing both seems like the worst solution. Inconsistency is annoying for both beginners and professionals.

[phkahler]

>> My key take-away is to consider how the language interacts with its ecosystem, not just how it should ideally operate in isolation.

Please please, how do we convey this to the mathematicians that infest wikipedia?

[seg_lol]

I would love someone like gwern [0] to write an analysis of how Mathematics articles on Wikipedia start off being understandable by most and then get lapped into a submicron finish that only reflects an insular subset of folks. These mathematical nuggets sit like hard grains in mud (sorry wikipedia) that only mathematicians can understand.

And in so doing, they slowly bootstrap themselves so far away from any grounding context that it is incredibly difficult for anyone to _learn_ mathematics from reading wikipedia articles.

There are groups doing great things like Setosa [1], nLab [2] and for concepts, Simplicable [3]

[0] https://www.gwern.net/

[1] https://setosa.io/ev/

[2] https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/HomePage

[3] https://simplicable.com/new/communication

[mannykannot]

I had not realized that was going on, but it makes a lot of sense now you mention it.