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by cbkeller 1463 days ago
I considered making one but didn't really feel it was worth it; in fact, there's a bit of a catch-22 in that Julia folks seem to have accumulated a reputation of "not being able to take criticism", so I think most folks in the community just decided to take it this time. That said, if there's popular demand for a "rebuttal" of sorts I would be happy to come up with one after I get a few more things off my desk (among I'm sure many others who may be more qualified).

I think it's safe to say that Julia has a notable ability to polarize people -- you tend to either love it or hate it. Personally, I can hardly even imagine using anything else at this point.
1 comments
cycomanic 1463 days ago
> I think it's safe to say that Julia has a notable ability to polarize people -- you tend to either love it or hate it. Personally, I can hardly even imagine using anything else at this point.

I think this is not true, many of us (including myself) were really intrigued by Julia and really wanted to like it, but came away a bit underwhelmed.

It certainly has some neat ideas and people do very interesting stuff with it. That said it is certainly not the panacea of "write code which is as easy as python but gets you the speed of C".

What is causing the current (small) backlash is the community being so strongly fanboyish and are still selling this uncritical view. Compared Julia fans, Rust proponents sound like they hate their language.

The advocacy is becoming quite off putting.

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cbkeller 1463 days ago
I think some people may expect it to be something that it's not. I'm probably a broken clock on this point but it's really a fundamentally different programming paradigm (dispatch-oriented) than most anything else, and organizing your code in a way that expects and works well with that paradigm (and what that means for how code is compiled) is, in my opinion, critical. If that works well for your problems or the way you like to think about things then great, if not then you may come away quite frustrated.

Try to fight against dispatch and squeeze Julia into OO or functional or etc. paradigms and you're Gonna Have a Bad Time, in my opinion.

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