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Comment by yomritoyj | Hacker News Reader

As an Indian working in India, the 'in Bengaluru' part actually makes me a bit sad. While Shah may have physically been in India when he was working on Julia, the project might not have happened without his having gone to the US for graduate studies. I can't think of any comparable project started entirely by people working in India.

The reason is not lack of ability: my guess is that at any time India's best institutions like the IITs or IISc have at least a hundred people who could build something like Julia. Instead it is perhaps India's poverty that prevents people from starting something that does not have an immediate academic or business payoff.

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While it is true that my PhD experience at UC Santa Barbara was crucial to my network of collaborators and work on Julia, there are several contributors to Julia from India who have not gone for graduate studies abroad. There are many contributions from undergraduates as well. I am just glad that Julia is a living breathing open source project with significant contributions and work from around the world, including India.

I don't think that IITs or IISc or institutions are deciding factors. I feel that people who do interesting stuff (not just in software, but in all aspects of life) do it despite their backgrounds, conditions, and other labels. Of course there is poverty, and lack of basic education for millions of people, but there are also millions of people in India, and the rest of the world, who have the skill to do very interesting things.

"While it is true that my PhD experience at UC Santa Barbara was crucial to my network of collaborators and work on Julia, there are several contributors to Julia from India who have not gone for graduate studies abroad. There are many contributions from undergraduates as well. I am just glad that Julia is a living breathing open source project with significant contributions and work from around the world, including India."

It reminds me of the collaboration between Hardy and Ramanujan. To me, the significant contributions from around the world, including India, represent Ramanujan working on his own in India while your PhD experience at UC Santa Barbara could be comparable to that of Ramanujan working in collaboration with Hardy at Cambridge. Hope that is not an overstatement. Your work should serve as an inspiration to many in India. Thank you for giving us a language to code in.

Indeed! Thank you for all the great work.

I was aware of large-scale project a few years back called FOSSEE (centered at IITB) which was promoting Python and Scilab. I'm not sure if they're still alive or whether they've run out of funds. Prabhu Ramachandran (of the Mayavi fame) was one of the key people behind it. Seems like something they ought to be funding.

Anyway, kudos to Simons foundation for funding Julia's development.

Manish Goregaokar[0] is a well-known Rust developer, and afaik he studied at IIT Bombay before going on to Mozilla. (Apologies if this is incorrect.)

[0]: https://github.com/Manishearth

It's true that these institutes haven't started something revolutionary, but there has been considerable amount of work in the right direction. I think there are multiple possible reasons behind it: 1) Most of the undergraduate students from these institutes either go study abroad or take up a job; which leaves only a fraction of the top students in these institutes. 2) Students who come for MS in these institutes have to clear GATE exam and most of them, according to what I have seen, join these institutes just for getting a good job and not for serious research.

Disclaimer: I work at one of the top institutes you mentioned.

Institutions are ultimately people and incentives. I have met with a number of researchers in these institutions where people are doing amazing research and I wish that they were able to contribute those advancements in the form of code in Julia.

Even as we worked on Julia, we have been snubbed by some who think Julia is not real research, and had a hard time getting papers published. There is a larger issue of how open source foundational software gets developed and incentives for people who do that. Universities incentivize writing papers, not software, unfortunately.

Eventually, it did work out and SIAM Review published our Julia paper.

https://julialang.org/publications/julia-fresh-approach-BEKS...

If it is poverty, they could start such projects after 2 years in industry, after they become somewhat comfortable. It is somthing else.

That's not how poverty works. Poor people don't suddenly change their mindset once they become rich. Some never change it.

Poor people are usually still afraid of falling back into poverty plus they still have poor friends or relatives who might rely on them.

Given a choice between surviving and building something new, anyone would choose surviving. The red tape in India even now is atrocious. Recent raids on sales tax enforcers turned up corruption money in truckloads.

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