[johan_felisaz]

Of course, these packages are fantastic, they do help a lot for more experienced users. But for a pure beginner, there is a high risk he will give up Julia after 10s of Plots.jl compilation, way before we would hear about these.

(and tbh, even leaving a REPL open all the time works perfectly fine, since include("myscript.jl") really does reload the script, unlike the import keyword in Python)

[eigenspace]

Yeah, that's fair. I guess I read your comment as saying that julia isn't a good replacement for Python, rather than it takes a tiny bit of learning when you're coming from other languages.

I think the way we talk about julia sometimes makes Python and Matlab programmers think they can just take some of their old code and copy paste it into julia, switch around some keywords and have everything be faster. It's important to emphasize to these people that it's a different language with its own idioms that need to be learned.

[qsi]

I strongly agree with that, coming from Matlab to both Python and Julia. While I enjoy some of the similarities between Julia and Matlab, it does take some learning and effort to write proper code in another language. Array indexing with square brackets in Julia tripped me up initially for instance as Matlab uses parentheses, and it still take non-zero mental effort to adjust when writing Julia (despite having done C in a distant past...).

Writing proper and idiomatic code that gets the best out of each language takes even longer as it requires more knowledge and experience. Having spent the last ten years or so predominantly in Matlab, and the corporate environment moving increasingly to Python, and my own interest in Julia, I am getting a double dose of this.

Pragmatically I like Matlab best, in large part because I am so comfortable in my workflow and the large existing codebase, but also the IDE, debugger, etc. I most fascinated by Julia but find that exploiting its potential has its own learning curve, and wrangling with type stability has its own challenges. I am least enthused by Python, which I am learning mostly from necessity, but this may be colored by my extreme aversion to its use of indentation.

[cbkeller]

I also started in Matlab + C, and didn't personally like Python very much, but wound up liking Julia after a bit of adjustment.

Still a work in progress, but I've written up a few of my lessons learned in the process [1] in case they're useful to anyone else. Properly figuring out type stability and dispatch-oriented programming took me way too long, but things started making a lot more sense after that.

I haven't used it a ton, but [2] also seems potentially useful for anyone else interested in making the same switch.

[1] https://github.com/brenhinkeller/JuliaAdviceForMatlabProgram...

[2] https://lakras.github.io/matlab-to-julia/

[danmur]

Python has importlib.reload(), though I haven't found much need to use it

[johan_felisaz]

Indeed. Given the fast startup time of Python, I've always just restarted the session (which is most of the time faster than typing "import importlib; importlib.reload()" haha)