Julia's still pretty new and under very heavy development. We all agree with your sentiment that distributing a set of commonly-useful packages along with the binary installation makes a lot of sense. I think there's an issue for that, it's on the roadmap as it were - it might be entirely doable within the next version or two of Julia, stay tuned.
Hopefully the bug you ran into that was causing trouble for Julia's package manager on Windows 8 is now resolved. Once you can use Pkg.add(), I think you'll come around to some of the things Julia has going for it over Matlab, despite the decades of head-start Matlab development had, and the enormous resources of thousands of Mathworks employees and millions in revenue behind it, and the difference in price :). Package manager speed and better discoverability and distributing common packages along with Julia binaries are acknowledged deficiencies that Julia needs work on. Solutions will come. On Saturday, May 10, 2014 5:14:15 AM UTC-7, kdb wrote: > > @Isaiah Norton > > Sorry, when rewriting my post I forgot to include that I know the > bugreport. By now a patch has been committed, but I don't know if I'll have > the time to set up a build environment for testing it before the next > binary pre-release. > > @Tony Kelman > > Summing it up: For each of the points a solution exists but none of them > are treated as core part of the system and a new user would have to > *find*them and install them separately first -- main issue being the "find" > part, > especially once there are multiple tools that seem to fulfill the same > purpose. > > That's not something someone, who just needs to get data analysis done, > wants to bother with, so they'll likely stick with MATLAB. Having a default > setup of such tools prepackaged and prominently promoted through the Julia > home-page (e.g. as a separate download variant) would likely help getting > such users into the community. Even for me as a technically inclined user, > worrying about extra packages and tools from the get go is a big deterrent > to trying a new tool. When the typical end-user compares solutions, he will > likely compare the freshly installed state without any extra stuff and > there MATLAB would have a HUGE advantage. > > > 2014-05-10 5:41 GMT+02:00 Isaiah Norton <[email protected] <javascript:> > >: > >> The specific issue mentioned #4 is known: >> https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/5574 >> Unfortunately I can't fully reproduce it locally (no Windows 8.1) and the >> hint of a lead that I found hasn't really panned out (yet, but I think it's >> the right direction). If anyone (a) has this problem and (b) is willing to >> do a debugging session over IRC and/or TeamViewer, that would be really >> great. >> >> >> On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 11:32 PM, Tony Kelman <[email protected]<javascript:> >> > wrote: >> >>> 1. There's Julia Studio by Forio, Julia-specific plugins for IPython, >>> Sublime Text, and Light Table, as well as a few native-Julia IDE's (using >>> Gtk or OpenGL or other toolkits) being worked on by various people. >>> >>> 2. https://github.com/malmaud/Autoreload.jl might be one solution for >>> this? >>> >>> 3. Don't think so, but I could be wrong. Discoverability and good >>> documentation across the package ecosystem is a tough problem, there are >>> some ideas and experiments floating around but no universal great solution >>> yet AFAIK. >>> >>> 4. I feel your pain regarding the brokenness of package management in >>> other languages on Windows. Yes, work is being done. A number of packages >>> are nicely set up to download any binary dependencies automatically on >>> Windows, I hope we can cover everything over time. It's a bit challenging >>> since most package developers don't use Windows very often if at all, but >>> there's usually no technical impediment to setting things up in Julia so >>> they Just Work (tm). Make noise and flag issues when things don't work on >>> Windows. >>> >>> >>> >>> On Friday, May 9, 2014 8:21:32 AM UTC-7, kdb wrote: >>>> >>>> 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. >>>> >>> >> >
