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by Moissanite 1285 days ago
I have confidence in Fortran continuing to exist in a useful state for my lifetime and beyond.

If Julia had evolved into a community-managed language in the same way that Python has, I would have a positive outlook on it - but I am nervous about the efforts to commercialise it (which mostly just seems to be a case of skimming value off of financial institutions). It is totally understandable why the creators went down this route, but I just wish they had been more idealistic rather than getting on the "everything is a VC-backed company" bandwagon. While I hope Julia continues to grow, I don't trust its longevity enough to put serious effort into using it for myself.
1 comments
adgjlsfhk1 1285 days ago
Julia is community managed. JuliaHub (previously known as JuliaComputing) does do a bunch of work on Julia, but doesn't "own" the language in the way Google does for Go. There are a number of Julia developers with exactly the same amount of control over Julia as anyone at JuliaHub has at a number of colleges and companies.
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Moissanite 1285 days ago
Sorry, not buying it. Entirely possible it is just a perception problem and not a real one, but the situation is just not comparable to a language like Fortran.

Google owning Go is a big downside, but I think people know that going in - also, Google makes no attempt to monetize the language.

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adgjlsfhk1 1285 days ago
The situation is very different from Fortran, but mostly in good ways. The Fortran standards committee's meetings aren't open to the public, and they publish a new version of the standard every 5 years that takes another 5 years for the compilers to catch up to (if they ever support the new version). In the Julia world, you just make a pull request on github, and if it's something that needs a discussion, it gets discussed in a meeting that happens every other week and is open to and takes input from anyone.
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