[wolvesechoes]

Python has useful and rich ecosystem that grows every day. Julia is mostly pile of broken promises (it neither reads as Python, nor it runs as C, at least not without significant effort required to produce curated benchmarks) and desperate hype generators.

[tagrun]

Since you have a rosy picture of Python, I assume you're young. Python has been mostly a fringe/toy language for 2 decades, until around ~2010, when a Python fad started not too different from the Rust fad of today, and at some point Google started using it seriously and thought they can fix Python but gave up eventually. The fad lived on and kept evolving and somehow found some popularity with SciPy and then ML. I used it in 90s a little, and I found the language bad for anything other than replacing simple bash scripts or simple desktop applications or a desktop calculator, and I still think it is (but sure, there are people who disagree and think it is a good language). It was slow and didn't have type system, you didn't know whether your code would crash or not until you run that line of code, and the correctness of your program depended on invisible characters.

"Ecosystem" is not a part of the language, and in any case, the Python ecosystem is not written in Python, because Python is not a suitable language for scientific computing, which is unsurprising because that's not what it was designed for.

It is ironic you bring up hype to criticize Julia while praising Python which found popularity thanks to hype rather than technical merit.

What promise are you referring to? Who promised you what? It's a programming language.

[wolvesechoes]

> Ecosystem" is not a part of the language, and in any case, the Python ecosystem is not written in Python, because Python is not a suitable language for scientific computing

Doesn't matter. Languages do not matter, ecosystems do, for they determine what is practically achievable.

And it doesn't matter that Python ecosystem relies on huge amounts of C/C++ code. Python people made the effort to wrap this code, document it and maintain those wrappers. Other people use such code through Python APIs. Yes, every language with FFI can do the same. For some reason none achieved that.

Even people using Julia use PythonCall.jl, that's how much Python is unsuitable.

> What promise are you referring to? Who promised you what? It's a programming language.

Acting dumb is poor rhetorical strategy, and ignores such a nice rhetorical advice as principle of charity - it is quite obvious that I didn't mean that programming language made any promise. Making a promise is something that only people can do. And Julia creators and people promoting it made quite bombastic claims throughout the years that turned out to not have much support in reality.

I leave your assumptions about my age or other properties to you.

[wrathofmonads]

Ecosystems matter, but runtimes do as well. Take Java, for instance. It didn’t have to wrap C/C++ libraries, yet it became synonymous with anything data-intensive. From Apache Hadoop to Flink, from Kafka to Pulsar. Sure, this is mostly ETL, streaming, and databases rather than numeric or scientific computing, but it shows that a language plus a strong ecosystem can drive a movement.

This is why I see Julia as the Java for technical computing. It’s tackling a domain that’s more numeric and math-heavy, not your average data pipeline, and while it hasn’t yet reached the same breadth as Python, the potential is there. Hopefully, over time, its ecosystem will blossom in the same way.

[tagrun]

If what determines the value of a language libraries (which makes no sense to me at all, but let's play your game), then it is one more argument against Python. You don't need FFI to use a Fortran library from Fortran, and I (and many physicists) have found Fortran better suited to HPC than Python since... the day Python came to existence. And no, many other scripting languages have wrappers, and no, scientific computing is not restricted to ML which the only area Python can be argued to have most wrapper libraries to external code.

Language matters, and two-language problem is a real problem, and you can't make it go away by closing your ears and chanting "doesn't matter! doesn't matter!"

Julia is a real step toward solving this problem, and allows you to interact with libraries/packages in ways that is not possible in Python + Fortran + C/C++ + others. You are free to keep pretending that problem doesn't exist.

You are making disparaging and hyperbolic claims about hyperbolic claims without proper attribution, and when asked for source, you cry foul and sadly try to appear smart by saying "you're acting dumb". You should take on your advice and instead of "acting dumb", explicitly cite what "promises" or "bombastic claims" you are referring to. This is what I asked you to do, but instead of doing it, you are doing what you are doing, which is interesting.

[wolvesechoes]

> If what determines the value of a language libraries (which makes no sense to me at all, but let's play your game), then it is one more argument against Python

The fact that you can use those nice numerical and scientific libraries from the language that had also tremendous amount of nice libraries from other domains, wide and good IDE support, is very well documented and has countless tutorials and books available... is an argument against that language? Because you can easily use Fortran code in Fortran?

Nice.

> You don't need FFI to use a Fortran library from Fortran

Wow. Didn't know that.

> And no, many other scripting languages have wrappers,

Always less complete, less documented, with less teaching materials available etc.

But sure, many other languages have wrappers. Julia for example wraps Python API.

> and no, scientific computing is not restricted to ML

Never said it is. I don't do ML, by the way.

> You are making disparaging and hyperbolic claims about hyperbolic claims without proper attribution, and when asked for source, you cry foul

Yeah, yeah. My claims on marketing like "Julia writes like Python, runs like C" are hyperbolic and require explicit citation, even though everyone that had any exposure to this language knows such and similar catch-phrases.

Look, you like Julia, good for you. Have fun with it.

[throwawaymaths]

in the early aughts educators loved the shit out of python because "it forced kids to organize their code with indentation". This was about a decade before formatting linters became low key required for languages.