On Thursday, 5 March 2015 18:49:24 UTC+1, Stefan Karpinski wrote: > > It's the people who are desperately unhappy with what they currently use > that might really benefit – and those people do exist. >
*raises his hand* That is exactly me. For years I have wanted a language for scientific computing with a nice syntax, nice API, and open source. I never managed to like Python + NumPy. I was using Octave, and I was on the mailing list asking if they'd consider making a few more improvements on the Matlab syntax when someone said "have a look at Julia, it has the things you are asking for". That was about a year after the official release of Julia (I think). > 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). > Yeah. When my last paper was getting ready to be submitted I upgraded *nothing*, even though a new and faster version of Julia had just come out. I could not take the risk of some of my scripts breaking at the last minute. > 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. > Yeah. A couple of people have asked me about Julia and I tell them something similar to what you just wrote. Cheers, Daniel.
