One thing Python does well, which Julia doesn't (yet) succeed in, is make it easy to start coding from zero experience and get something that executes "well enough" (although, as always with first-time coders, code organization and readability might still leave some things to wish for...).
In Julia, it's very much possible to get something to run, but the performance differences between well-written and not-so-well-written code are *huge*. This means that most users will show their code to someone who knows more than they do, and more likely than not get a first reaction along the lines of "everything you do is wrong". Although the statement isn't untrue, it's very off-putting - and even more off-putting is the fact that there's a lot of "computer sciencey" stuff you need to understand to be able to grasp *why* you did it wrong (type stability, difference between abstract and leaf types, difference between anonymous and named functions etc). Don't get me wrong - I think Julia is doing a lot of things right, and I'm glad that these "CS-y" questions are asked and handled up-front: this is what gives Julia much of its power. Hopefully, much of the performance difference between hacked-together-rubbish code and well-polished code will be eradicated by version 1.0, and we'll see how popular Julia becomes then. Currently, though, the success of any general programming language or tool seems to hinge mostly on what you can build with it (Objective C is ugly as hell, but it was, until very recently, the only way to build iPhone apps so people learned anyway. Similarly, everyone seems to know a little JavaScript these days, despite all its quirks <https://archive.org/details/wat_destroyallsoftware>...). I think the success of Julia, outside of the scientific computing niche, will depend mostly on where (as in on what platforms) Julia 1.0 can be executed. // T On Tuesday, September 29, 2015 at 11:30:19 AM UTC+2, Sisyphuss wrote: > > While waiting Julia 0.4 stabilizing, let's do some brainstorming. > > What's the reason of the Success of Python? > If Julia had appeared 10 years earlier, will Python still have this > success? > > >
