Stream 2: Build a great SaaS platform for running Julia, charge for compute
Since all of our domain products are built in Julia and often involve significant compute cost for their intended application, hopefully both at the same time :).
My own view is that Julia Computing is distinguished a bit by a more product focus.
It's a bit less of a pure language / infra play and more a product play. Ie, docker / containers was almost a pure infra play in the end. These guys make actual things you can use.
The later sells better into business I think and is less likely to be competed against. Google / AWS et al are generally pretty quick to compete on the infra play level.
thanks for the answer Keno. i guess an example Stream 1 product is Pumas. i didn't realize it's a separate product from Julia.
my background is in finance and i am curious if you have any plans to break into that domain (examples on your website include julia language use)
Finance was a focus area early on and we have a fair number of consulting clients there and JuliaHub is available of course, but we were never able to figure out a dedicated domain-specific, non-niche product to sell into the space. Maybe in the future.
Lots of finance companies shell out a lot of money for KDB+, a fast real-time database. Other than performance, the main selling point is that it comes with its own imperative language (K/Q). You can build entire API's and trading systems in Q: persistence, load balancing, streaming analytics, &tc. In that way, Q solves a different "two-language problem". There are not many serious competitors.
If Julia had its own lean realtime database implementation, then I can see it becomming a killer language for finance. JuliaDB/OnlineStats is probably 60% of the way there.
lol doesn't this create perverse incentives - i.e. you're incentivized to actually make Julia slower sine it'll lead to being able to charge more for compute :p
Uber for numpy, perhaps. The best case scenario would be like Oracle and JavaSE. I lack the imagination to speculate on the worst case, so I am quite surprised that anyone expects to make more than $24M in profit from yet another programming language. Particularly one which caters to the narrow intersection of one-off scripts/rapid iteration, efficient machine code generation, but without limitations on memory usage.
The product is not the programming language. As addressed in there and on this board, there's a healthy set of products around pharmaceutical modeling and simulation (Pumas-AI, adopted by groups like Moderna), a cloud compute service JuliaHub, multi-physics simulation tools (JuliaSim), and upcoming verticals like JuliaSPICE for circuit simulation. Each of these themselves are entrants into billion dollar industries with tools that are, in some cases, already outperforming the current market leaders in computational speed and are quickly getting modern reactive GUIs. The Julia part is simply that it was founded by the creators of the Julia programming language and this stack is then (of course) built in Julia, leveraging all of its tools to reach these speeds. But the product is not the language itself.
Stream 1: Build amazing products for particular domains, charge license fees
Stream 2: Build a great SaaS platform for running Julia, charge for compute
Since all of our domain products are built in Julia and often involve significant compute cost for their intended application, hopefully both at the same time :).