I'm like you Seth in that I don't use most of the stuff that people on this list talk about. I also have no frame-of-reference to MATLAB, just a Python/R/SQL guy (and recovering SAS user).
For me, the language is plenty stable, but I also appreciate a challenge. But for my common workflow, I mostly just need to interpolate strings, get data from databases, make plots. I successfully use Hadoop via Julia via ODBC via Hive (whew!) nearly everyday, and it works great for me. Gadlfy is a bit slow to get started up, but given that I can output to d3 and post to the web...that's a pretty killer feature. So it's really just perspective. I show people what I'm doing, and if they get interested, great. As a previous commenter wrote, there are people who create languages/packages and people who wait for the packages to be developed. On Thursday, March 5, 2015 at 10:38:00 AM UTC-5, Seth wrote: > > I'm probably one of the few Julia users who's NOT using it for scientific > / numerical analysis / very-obscure-technical-field work. I'm just a > general programmer - I'm more interested in getting data from point A to > point B, processing it quickly (whether that's parsing web server logs or > creating user activity graphs - a lot of the work I do is security > related), and then outputting it in a way that makes sense to me. I use > python but find that Julia's speed (both of execution and of development) > is too good to pass up, especially for complex things. (Also, python's > regex handling is horrific, and really, no general programmer is still > using Perl :) ) > > For my use case Julia is both amazingly good and incredibly frustrating. I > love writing Julia code, but the instability of some of the core libraries > drives me nuts. Here's my biggest challenge: > > Core to any language should be a standards-based way of getting data in > and out. Right now Julia's a bit of a mess in that regard. For example, > Base has download(), which in turn relies on system utilities: curl, wget, > or fetch, according to the docs, which also say something to the effect of > "casual use only". JuliaWeb (of which I am a member) has a variety of > packages with duplicate functionality, including Requests.jl and > HTTPClient, but there is no settled standard yet for the underlying > technology, and each package has its own set of limitations not found (or > better hidden) in more mature packages in other languages. > > Until we figure out a way to make it easy for folks to get their data into > and out of Julia, I think we're leaving potential new users "on the table", > unwilling to switch because migration is just too hard, and the lack of > good data transfer / network utilities is a large part of that. So this is > my plea: if you're interested in helping form the basis for a great > web/data transport stack in Julia, please join us in JuliaWeb. We've got a > list of issues posted https://github.com/JuliaWeb/Roadmap/issues in case > you feel an urge to help fix some things and develop some new things. It's > pretty much a green field at this point. > > >
