[geokon]

I don't know if you genuinely want feedback... But I'll share my very short experience. I tried Julia one time a few years back. I'll be honest, I didn't put in a lot of effort into (but nor will most potential Matlab converts - bc people are busy and have stuff to do)

It's got a frustrating "not fun" on-boarding. ie. the number of minutes from downloading "Julia" to getting cool satisfying results

1. It not a calculator on steroids like Matlab. It doesn't have one main open source IDE like Octave/Rstudio that you can drop in and play around in (see plots docs repl workspace)

2. The default language is more like a "proper programming language". To even make a basic plot you need to import one of a dozen plotting libraries (which requires learning how libraries and importing works - boring ..) and how is someone just getting started to decide which one..? I don't need that analysis paralysis when I'm just getting started

3. Documentation .. Well it's very hard to compete with Matlab here - but the website is not as confidence inducing. The landing page is a wall of text: https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/ Tbh, from the subsequent manual listing it's not even clear it's a math-focused programming language . It's talking about constructors, data types, ffi, stack traces, networking etc etc.

[markkitti]

A lot has changed in a few years. This release is a big one.

1. I run Julia on my smartphone and often use it as calculator.

2. You typically only need Plots.jl for most needs. See https://docs.juliaplots.org/stable/

3. See https://juliaacademy.com

Another alternative environment are Pluto notebooks. It's reactive like a spreadsheet, but easy to use in your browser.

https://featured.plutojl.org/

I have several users without much coding experience using Pluto notebooks just to generate plots from CSV files. They are finding the combination of a web based interface, reactive UI, and fast execution easier to use than a MATLAB Live script.

[freilanzer]

> 1. I run Julia on my smartphone and often use it as calculator.

How?

[geokon]

You could probably run Termux and launch a REPL from the command line?

[galangalalgol]

I launch pluto from fedora running in termix, then I have a tab open in firefox pointed at localhost and have a pluto notebook to do stuff in. I don't do this often, typing in phones is hard for me.

Edit: I almost like unicodeplots.jl better though. Its much lighter weight and still lets me figure out most stuff I use plotting for. Through a ssh session if necessary.

[cookieperson]

Great way to eat a quarter gig of RAM before doing anything on a small compute device...

[jrockway]

Probably less RAM than the average browser tab uses. 250MB of RAM? I've forgotten how to count that low.

Today's smartphone has higher specs than my $10,000 workstation from 10 years ago.

[cookieperson]

Compare the Julia repls memory consumption and resources used vs python for using it as a calculator. Looking at orders of magnitude in different resources consumed and time to first anything especially on a computer restrained device...Better yet do the same as the unix tool BC. I am very much aware of when I start tossing quarter to half gbs of RAM on small devices to do things like 1+1=2... Leave two or three of those open by being lazy/forgetful and yea there goes a huge chunk of RAM. To be fair I also don't spend thousands of dollars on the latest phones...

[geokon]

Not to detract from everything else.. I've gotta say, that's the most confusing library name possible. First I thought it's a website about Julia plotting libraries. Then I thought it's a new Julia default plotting interface (with actual plotting libraries as backends). Then after I saw the code I realized that it's a library that literally called "plots"...

I'm sure it's great SEO though

[sundarurfriend]

Are you referring to Plots.jl? All Julia libraries end with a .jl in their name; sort of like how many Python libraries start with `py`, and Rust libraries have `rs` as a suffix. Having it be universal makes it more consistent, and leaves the rest of the name to be completely about the content of the package. In my experience/opinion, that has lead to better package names (though Julia's package naming policies also help a lot).

> Then I thought it's a new Julia default plotting interface (with actual plotting libraries as backends). Then after I saw the code I realized that it's a library that literally called "plots"...

It's both. It's a library called Plots.jl, that's a plotting interface to backend plotting libraries. It's not "new", not "default" in the sense of built-in, but usually the recommend first option for most use cases.

[geokon]

the `.jl` was in effect dropped. Tbh, I landed on the page and started to skim it and it was highly confusing..

Just try to read the landing page without realizing "Plots" is a proper name :))

"juliaplots.org" - looks like a website about plotting in Julia

"Plots - powerful convenience for visualization in Julia" I guess they are...

"Almost everything in Plots is done by specifying plot attributes." I guess you could abstract all plotting that way.. interesting take

"Intro to Plots in Julia" an introduction to plotting in Julia!

"Plots is a visualization interface and toolset" I guess that's a way to think about plotting.. kinda philosophical.. but okay

Only when I got to this sentence "Plots might be the last plotting package you ever learn." did I realize this was the actual proper name of the library :))

I can also imagine using the name in conversation would lead to ridiculous things like "You should making your plots with plots" etc.

Anyway, it's just a bit confusing when you skim it. It's gotta be one of the most unusual library names I've seen

[goerz]

It’s pretty typical for the conventions of Julia package naming… Plots, Statistics, DifferentialEquations, …

[stellalo]

The library is called Plots because it plots, what is confusing about it?

[sundarurfriend]

> 1. It doesn't have one main open source IDE like Octave/Rstudio that you can drop in and play around in. (you can see plots docs repl workspace)

It's looking like VS Code (julia-vscode.org) will be the equivalent, and it's gotten a good chunk of the way towards that - "plots docs repl" are all existing features and pretty easy to use. The docs [1] show a "Workspace" feature too. There's also some integration with tools like JET.jl [2] so that there's in-editor code analysis and diagnostics.

(And the extension works in VS Codium as well, so you can go completely FOSS if that's your wish.)

[1] https://www.julia-vscode.org/docs/stable/userguide/grid/ [2] https://aviatesk.github.io/JET.jl/stable/

[stellalo]

> Tbh, from the subsequent manual listing it's not even clear it's a math-focused programming language

It’s true that the majority of the Julia community comes from a scientific or engineering background, and this is reflected in the package ecosystem and some of the “embedded” language features for technical computing. However I feel like stressing Julia as a “technical language” any more than it currently is may scare away people that may want to use it for other purposes, such as a general purpose scripting language.

Now more than ever before, with the improved code caching in 1.9, Julia lends itself perfectly for interactive usage and day-to-day scripting.

[goerz]

I’m a heavy Julia user, and I love the language, but I really wouldn’t recommend it as a “general purpose scripting language”. Pushing the idea that it is will only lead to disappointment in new users. Julia is very much a language for scientific computing, in the broadest sense.

[zorked]

VS Code supports Julia well, both plain and in Jupyter notebooks.

[vfclists]

What is the relevance of a review of the language tried one time a few years back?

Today is not a few years back.

No one genuinely wants a review of the product from a few years back if they are seriously considering the language today.

Julia is not Lisp or Scheme.