On Tue, Sep 13, 2016 at 10:21 AM, Adeel Malik <adeel.malik...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I would Like to ask few questions about Julia that I could not find it on > the internet. > > 1) Who were the very first few users of Julia ? > Julia was developed by Jeff Bezanson, Viral Shah and myself, funded (in part) by Alan Edelman; and Alan was the first user, unless you consider the three initial developers to be users. He also had an MIT class use Julia for numerical stuff before Julia 1.0, and they were probably the next round of early users after Alan. Jameson Nash was one of those students, so at least one of them liked it :) 2) Who were the industrial customers of Julia when it was first released? > Who are those industrial customers now? > Intel, BlackRock, the FAA (ACAS X), Conning, Invenia, Voxel8 and a number of other companies have publicly talked about using Julia and have sponsored JuliaCons. There are many others too but some are not public and its nearly impossible to track this. Julia just broke into the top 50 programming languages on the Tiobe Index <http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/> – there are a lot of users these days. 3) How Julia found more users? > Word of mouth, talks at conferences, and sites like Hacker News and Reddit, and the occasional article in magazines like Wired. 4) How Julia survived against Python and R at first release? > The initial selling point is that it's much faster. But people come for the speed and stay for the features and productivity (and speed). Or they don't – some people get frustrated by the less mature ecosystem and go back to using what they were before, but those people are far outnumbered by the people who keep on using Julia, or the user base wouldn't be growing so fast.
