> > For this reason, while I am happy to talk about how nice Julia is, I > will not try to convince people to switch to it. IMO the people who are > potential switchers at this stage have already looked at Julia, and > evangelizing more aggressively could be counterproductive at this stage.
I think this is really important. Personally, I am thrilled with Julia, because I write code that does not need any packages other than plotting and File I/O. But I really need the combination of rapid development (scripting, dynamic) and then being able to optimise certain passages, without ever having to switch to C. But I would never recommend Julia (at this stage) to a "production user", only to people who might like to "play with it". The main point I make to people is that the entry barrier from Matlab to Julia is incredibly low. (Whereas from Matlab to Python it is huge.) The only real hurdle for Matlab people, I think, is to get used to multiple dispatch, that took me a while, but I am now in a constant state of bliss :). So far, I've convinced my entire research group, three collaborators and a friend's postdoc to try out Julia both for research and teaching, and the response I got from everyone so far has been very positive. We are all numerical analysts, or related disciplines, and for us it is just a wonderful language. Christoph
