[CJefferson]

I've had a couple of conversations on twitter with Viral B Shah (co creator of Julia) which I found unprofessional, so I stopped learning Julia. Unless he was just having a very bad day, in my opinion he takes badly to minor criticism of Julia (although others might disagree).

Edit, here is one thread I could find quickly: <EDIT2: edited out link which most people seem to think is actually fine, just people getting slightly annoyed on Twitter. I deleted the link as people were going and interacting with people in the old thread>

The comments aren't particularly bad, but they do feel to me like making a bad faith interpretation of someone's comment, then digging in. I don't feel that's a good way to talk to users, and ethos comes from the top.

[cbkeller]

I don't see anything problematic in what Viral said here; I think it would be fair to say your initial take ("Julia has been the future of machine learning for 10 years and will stay as the future of machine learning for the next 10 years") is likely to be perceived as at least somewhat inflammatory, a defensive response is natural enough in that context.

[saghm]

Yeah, I fully expected based on the description of the twitter interaction to see something really terrible, and from actually looking at it, it seems pretty mild. If anything, it seems like they went out of their way to try to bait the Julia creator and he had a fairly reasonable response to it. I'm not sure what could be considered "inflammatory" about any that.

[CJefferson]

What part of the conversation justifies "If you truly believe that nobody will ever adopt anything new, we would all have been programming in Fortran or assembly!"? To me that is a stupid escalation -- noone was suggesting not to do new things, Python (the discussed AI alternative) is of course newer than Fortran and assembly for a start!

That just seemed like a bizarre overreaction to me.

[urschrei]

With the greatest respect, nothing about his comment is inflammatory in the least, and I say this as someone who is avowedly skeptical about the ability of the Julia creators to accept criticism.

[CJefferson]

It's nice to hear an independent viewpoint. To me it was "oh, so randomo on Twitter is coming in randomly and looking angry. Oh, it's not a randomo, it's to co-creator of Julia!".

[chrsig]

That thread is just ripe with bad communication across the board. It's pretty clear that none of you understand what each other is saying, but are very willing to infer.

Maybe try not communicating on twitter.

[Sukera]

Do you have an example? I'd like to know more about this - it must have been quite egregious if it makes you stop learning a language.

[CJefferson]

I posted one in. It isn't that bad, but to be honest nowadays I believe the community of a language is as important, if not more important, than the language itself. I don't want to get into a community whose leaders just start jumping on random minor Twitter users.

[joaogui1]

That guy is a famous Kaggler that works for Nvidia, not a minor Twitter user

[CJefferson]

Honestly, it's interesting you say that, I went and looked at his follower count and see what you mean. I knew him back before any of us had Twitter :)