Reading about julia, I came to quickly like the language. Everyday use however would be more about quick-and-dirty data analysis, so some questions surfaced regarding usability for non-programming usecases, specifically in MS Windows environments. Some of these expectations have been set by MATLAB, though I used it only shortly during a voluntary lecture roughly 7 years ago.
*1. A GUI for interactive use?* While the REPL that comes with Julia 0.3.0 works perfectly fine on Windows, MATLABs GUI makes it easier to just dive into the work. User-defined variables are shown, and can be manipulated with the mouse and it comes with a builtin editor for quick-and-dirty scripts, when the REPL alone doesn't cut it anymore. While the *help* and *apropos* functions are great, a GUI interface would help, mostly because it smoothes the learning curve for beginners. *2. Quick-and-dirty scripts?* In MATLAB, you can just create *.m* files in the working directory, which then are treated as function definitions that can be easily modified at any time and, as far as I've read, function definitions are updated automatically when the file is changed. Does Julia provide such facilities for interactive developement/data analysis? Note that already having to type something like *reload mymodule.jl* would already be a disadvantage. *3. Auto-Import and global search?* Is it possible to just write *somemodule.somefunction(x)* rather than explicitly importing the module first? And does e.g. *apropos(string)* search globally all installed modules, maybe including user files? Both would help a new user in exploring the possibilities of the environment. *4. Windows-compatible package management?* As a prime example, currently *Pkg.update(), Pkg.add(...)* are broken on Windows 8. For some reason, *git* is not able to send DNS when called from within Julia; The bug is being worked on, but it illustrates an issue I have found across the module management systems I tried, be it Perl (CPAN), or Python (easy_install, pip): They tend to not work reliably on Windows. Is work being done to make the prospects in that regard better for Julia? I'm asking these questions not only out of personal interest, but also because I think that they might be important for convincing less-technical users to give Julia an honest try and thus to spread basic knowledge of the language.
