Packages: I fall into the camp of "tiny base, curated packages". It would be great to have an absolutely minimal core julia, and then lots of "build recipes" for those people that want a matlab-like experience. For example, JuliaStats could be responsible for compiling a "best of breed" list of key stats and plotting packages for the "stats recipe", etc. Then on installation you can say what recipes you'd like to include (maybe it defaults to most/all of the major recipes so people don't even need to think about it?).
Plotting: I agree that simple plotting with minimal dependencies is the way to go for a standard package. I don't think Gadfly fits that very well in it's current form... there needs to be simple ways to plot and there should not be a strong (or any?) dependency on DataFrames. I'm certainly not recommending that this become standard, but look at the readme of https://github.com/tbreloff/Qwt.jl as what I think the basic plotting interface should look like. On Monday, July 13, 2015 at 5:12:53 AM UTC-4, [email protected] wrote: > > On Sunday, 12 July 2015 22:47:42 UTC+2, Tony Kelman wrote: > >> > I think there's a big differences between developing core features in >> packages and shipping them with the default version and having optional >> third party packages implementing core features. >> >> Like what, exactly? If the complaint is about ease of installation of >> packages, then that's a known and acknowledged bug (set of bugs) that >> people are thinking about how to do a better job of. We could always use >> more help making things better. >> > > If there's a bunch of official packages that are shipped with default > version it's like having no packages, it's just a way for the devs to > organize their work internally that doesn't concern the user too much. > > On the other hand for third party packages the user has to find them, > install them, debug them, worry about long term maintenance, etc. In > reality it's a bit more fuzzy than that, so maybe my distinction isn't so > relevant. > > > For plotting I think it would be better to have any plotting than none, > even though not everybody will agree on the best choice for the one. The > least dependencies seems the most important criteria to me, as long as you > can draw lines, points and surfaces with decent performances. The high > level interface doesn't matter that much in my opinion. >
