Yes, good points all... I'd also point out that there is a Compat.jl package, as well as a deprecation facility, that help smooth over most of the syntax changes that happen in Julia...
On Thursday, June 18, 2015 at 12:38:28 PM UTC-4, Isaiah wrote: > > I am just wondering if the core language itself (syntax etc.) would change >> a lot in the future or not. > > > I think there is an important distinction to be made here: > > - depending on the features you use, parts of your code will almost > certainly break from 0.3 -> 0.4 -> 0.5 -> .... As John said, these changes > are (a) usually beneficial overall, and (b) usually not tremendously hard > to adapt to (and will hopefully become easier over time as debugging tools > and things like Lint.jl mature) > > - your mental model *mostly* shouldn't. Julia probably won't be dropping > garbage collection, adopting whitespace-denoted blocks, switching to > 0-based indexing (don't ask...), adopting an Idris-level of strictness in > the type system, etc. Hopefully I don't eat my words, but this shouldn't be > like Rust 0.3 -> 1.0 where a similar-looking but remarkably changed > language emerged over the years [not meant as a criticism, btw: Rust's open > development process specifically, and overall community, are very > inspirational] > > On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 11:34 AM, J.Z. <[email protected] <javascript:>> > wrote: > >> I should have been more specific. I am just wondering if the core >> language itself (syntax etc.) would change a lot in the future or not. I am >> not expecting that Julia has a specific package that R provides. But then >> it's good to know whether the fundamentals like basic visualization and >> optimization functions are mature or not. >> >> >> On Thursday, June 18, 2015 at 10:57:08 AM UTC-4, John Myles White wrote: >>> >>> My answer to these questions is always the same these days: if you're >>> not sure that you have enough expertise to determine Julia's value for >>> yourself, then you should be cautious and stick to playing around with >>> Julia rather than trying to jump onboard wholesale. Julia is a wonderful >>> language and it's very usable for many things, but you shouldn't expect >>> that you can do all (or even most) of your work in Julia unless you're >>> confident that you can do the development work required to implement any >>> functionality that you find to be missing. Depending on your specific >>> interests, you might find that Julia is missing nothing or you might find >>> that Julia is missing everything. >>> >>> -- John >>> >>> On Thursday, June 18, 2015 at 7:27:52 AM UTC-7, J.Z. wrote: >>>> >>>> Hi, >>>> >>>> I have been following julia for some time and have seen lots of >>>> positive comments. There are still lots of good work being put into its >>>> development. I use R and Python to do lots of technical (statistical) >>>> computing and would like to try julia for my work. My quick question to >>>> the >>>> current users and developers is that whether it is a good time to learn >>>> julia now, or should I wait until the language is more mature? Could it be >>>> the case that things I learn now would be broken in future releases and I >>>> have to relearn everything? >>>> >>>> Thanks! >>>> JZ >>>> >>> >
