I tried to use Julia, but give up. Right now. I just came here to search again for posts about IDEs for Julia and found this thread. So let me comment why I am giving up: because there is no IDE available which would really support me to get my things done.
MATLAB speed can be slow, and Julia might be faster, but my limited programming skills are by far the most significant factor lowering progress speed. MATLAB, as you all know, is not just a language, it is a very advanced programming environment, with rich documentation, including tutorials and code examples for beginners. It is a useful tool also for people who are not first hand programmers, but just people who need to get a solution for a problem glued together. Nothing against the Julia REPL, but that is just not a straight forward environment like the IDE of MATLAB with a "variable" browser, an editor with code folding and cell evaluation, etc, tools for data inspection and IDE and data output configure possibilities, and File Exchange and Help forums serving you with whatever you might need. Although Julia is an impressive language project, its infrastructure is not. Not at all. I just tried to get warm with Juno, for several days. No way, it is not intuitive to handle. I have -as a not native english speaker- to guess english words for putting them into the CTRL+Space command line just to hope that maybe some useful link to a function appears. If not, then I wonder if my search term was not the correct one or if a function does not exist. Simple tasks like changing the background and foreground colors of the editor are not available. Maybe such functionality is available, but first you have to study for a week how LightTable is programmed, and learn how to program its configuration files. And things which work on my Win7 computer do not work on my WinXP notebook. Eclipse integration of Julia is costly and still not rich, Spyder integration is hard to find, IJulia is not really comparable with a full featured editor or IDE neither. Conclusion: in order to get my programming work done, I either would have to spend a lot of time to study too many new tools without finding in them convenient and known workflow offered as in MATLAB, SPYDER, ECLIPSE or MS Visual Studio, or I just don't start to use Julia by now and better wait until the infrastructure supporting the language became built as well. Don't get me wrong, I am impressed by the Julia project, and all of you out there designing tools like Juno for sure are far ahead of me in your programming skills and it is my fault to not have gained skills enough to support the Julia world myself with some useful utility. Well, I am just a user. A user looking forward to come back to Julia when the infrastructure more addresses also the not-professional-programmer and the not-million-key-shortcut-knowing scientist who just needs to get some algorithm up and running. I guess that is why you find it hard to attract new, "normal" users to use Julia. Julia to me still appears to be only made for geeks, not because of the language, not because of programming something in Julia, but because you have to be a geek to handle Julia, you have to be a geek to first get a whole programming environment set up by yourself - instead of just using one and concentrate on you Julia algorithm.
