This feels appropriate:
tl;dr: Julia is a great idea, but with poor testing and quality control. Community is (apparently) a bunch of dicks.
Just to be clear, I don't personally have much experience with it, I'm just summarizing Dan's review.
tl;dr: Julia is a great idea, but with poor testing and quality control. Community is (apparently) a bunch of dicks.
Just to be clear, I don't personally have much experience with it, I'm just summarizing Dan's review.
This is not true at all. I personally know some of the core devs, they are very sharp programmers and very humble people. The community is very open to suggestions, and very welcoming to new people.
Yes, just my personal experience, and I'm not claiming that no one ever had a bad experience, but I didn't want to let that pass unchallenged.
There have been major improvements in the past three years and code coverage is now consistently above 80%.
> Community is (apparently) a bunch of ...
I'm admittedly biased, but based on a number of years of experience and personal efforts, I think this is not a fair characterization. I don't know what happened in that private forum -- but I do know that the Julia community is thousands of people, with a huge, public archive of helpful, respectful interactions among newbies, non-Julia experts, core devs, and everyone in between.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/julia-users
(Disclosure: Julia committer)
Anyhow, the community never seems standoffish or "dickish" to me. I've had good responses, despite disagreeing on a few PR requests.
I would say there is still a bit of a quality control issue but it's still a young project. Hopefully the new funding and commercial support will help pay for better QC. Not many of the core team appear to have done much in the way of "plain old software development" so the community lacks a bit of learning from applying things in industry. Likely the ongoing experience with Julia and the various support contracts will shore that up quickly. :-) For example, there was a (defunct) startup Staffjoy doing schedule optimization using Julia and their write up was that little things like dropping literal Dict syntax was a huge pain for their test code [1].
[1]: https://blog.staffjoy.com/retro-on-the-julia-programming-lan...
Not everyone (most are kind and welcoming), but yeah that has been my experience as well with some members.