I know some colleagues who are specifically waiting for the debugger to improve before adapting Julia, especially for teaching, so these things can be a deal-breaker for some people, even if the core is stable.
I can easily live with the changes in the core language --- where I would like to see some improvements is the facilities that allow developing more interactively, eg the infamous #265, manipulating the module namespace during runtime (like CL:UNINTERN, also take care of type redefinitions, etc), but these things I can work around. Best, Tamas On Thu, Mar 05 2015, Stefan Karpinski <[email protected]> wrote: > There's a big difference between immaturity of development tools – IDE, > debugger, etc. – and stability and reliability of the language runtime > itself. The Julia runtime is quite stable and usable for production once > you've got a set of packages that work nicely together installed. Getting > to that point has some rough edges due to the tooling, but once you're > there, it's not like Julia randomly segfaults. > > On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 4:28 PM, Christoph Ortner <[email protected] >> wrote: > >> >> >> On Thursday, 5 March 2015 17:49:24 UTC, Stefan Karpinski wrote: >> >>> On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 7:43 AM, Christoph Ortner <[email protected]> >>> wrote: >>> >>>> 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". >>>> >>> >>> I think this depends on how much pain the alternatives are causing. I >>> would never try to sell someone on Julia if they're perfectly happy with >>> Matlab or Python or R – if those are working for them, great! It's the >>> people who are desperately unhappy with what they currently use that might >>> really benefit – and those people do exist. There are people now using >>> Julia in production for whom the alternatives were to prototype in >>> Matlab/R/Python and then rewrite everything in C++ or Java for performance; >>> but the amount of development time and effort entailed in that process just >>> wasn't feasible. Even with the relative immaturity of the Julia ecosystem, >>> it is still more productive in some circumstances to be able to prototype >>> *and* deploy in the same language. It's a matter of picking your poison: >>> you can go with the established languages and have a lot of pain around the >>> performance vs. productivity tradeoff; or you can go with Julia and that >>> won't be an issue, but you'll have to deal with sometimes implementing >>> things that other language already have packages for and with packages >>> sometimes breaking when you upgrade them (the secret is don't upgrade >>> often). As long as that tradeoff is clear, I think it's ok to recommend >>> Julia, but one does have to set expectations honestly and not oversell it. >>> >> >> Maybe my statement was a bit too strong and also should have been clear >> about "production user": people who need mature packages (and in fact here >> it depends very much on what they need as e.g. Julia has much of Numpy and >> SciPy in Base already) and a mature development environment. >> I like Juno and I think ESS is ok, but I would call neither "mature", >> e.g., missing debugger, profiling is not built-in, auto-complete is far >> from perfect and getting help text in the editor does not work consistently >> either. And finally breaking backward compatibility every few months? As I >> said above I am hugely enjoying Julia, but these are the things I warn >> people about. >> >> (Btw, some of my friends and colleagues have even started mocking me about >> my enthusiasm for Julia - so it is not as if I am doing a bad >> advertising-job ;).) >>
