I'm not a scientific programmer. In fact, I haven't been a professionally paid developer/dev mgmt for 8 years. However, being able to quickly code up a solution to a problem, to perform my own research on our data, and generate my own reports has proven to be highly valuable to my career on the business side.
With that said, I have been on the hunt for a language that is easy to use, allows me to concisely expresse what I'm looking to accomplish, and have reasonable performance. I've used verbose languages like java and c#, scripting languages like perl and python, next generation clr based languages like Nemerle and Cobra, functional languages like Lisp and Clojure, and even self contained environments like Pharo smalltalk. There are great features in those languages, but there was always something that after a couple projects that jumped out as a big turn off or an obstacle that couldn't reasonably be overcome. In each case, I jumped ship and moved on to find the next promising candidate. I've been using julia for a number of months and have written several projects. I haven't found a single obstacle that couldn't be overcome. With ccall and pycall I can access a ton of libraries and the overall julia syntax is so concise and expressive that writing software is enjoyable. I'm convinced that julia has a huge future in non-technical / general purpose software development. But since not a lot of effort is expended (yet) on publicizing to the masses, only the people actively searching for an alternative will find it in the short term. To be honest I think that is a good thing. From my perspective, the development efforts are rightly focused on the important things. For the language to appeal to the masses, the installation process and environment configuration would need to be idiot proof and a ton of introductory documentation is needed. Currently, if you run into a problem you might have to actually research it yourself. You will have to read source code that you didn't write and maybe even have to make your own temporary fix. This is a non-issue for motivated, bright technical people. However based on my experience, it's a non-starter for an average business applications developer. As the environment and packages mature, these issues will go away and over the next couple years, my prediction is that julia will seen a massive increase in adoption outside of the technical computing world. I want to do my part and blog about the general capabilities of julia and some of the excellent packages such as DataFrames, ODBC/SQLite, Match, and PyCall, that make developing quick and painless. It's just a matter of finding the time ;) On Monday, February 17, 2014 1:22:38 PM UTC-5, Dave Bettin wrote: > > Julia is promoted as a technical computing language. However, there is > this beautiful general purpose language waiting to be unleashed onto the > masses. > > Why is this aspect of the language not communicated/marketed more? > > Additionally, is there currently anyone using Julia outside of the > technical computing space? >
