Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by amkkma 1802 days ago
>I’ve seen a cult-like behavior in Julia community that is borderline toxic. Sorry, it’s the truth and needs to be said. Speed isn’t everything and people are magnetized by the benchmarks on the Julia website, especially non-software engineers.

I think all languages have this dynamic...I've seen it with python and R. To some extent it's fed by what we perceive as criticisms from people defending their favorite incumbent language with arguments that aren't at all informed- such as a focus on speed and how numba achieves parity there.

In the same vein, I and many Julia users are enthusiastic precisely because of thing other than speed, such as the type system, abstractions, differentiability and other things that make programming more joyful, fluid and productive.

Agree though, that we could always improve on acceptance of criticism.

1 comments

Agreed and thanks for being charitable for the Julia community. It’s an interesting thing to balance: push and market the language, navigate haters and naysayers while also deeply respecting feedback and criticisms. We can all do better.