* Julia is a joy to use and fits my use case and/or personal development style really well;
* Other tools have not been such a natural match to my needs;
* Julia has its fair share of limitations, and someone else with different priorities would quite reasonably not find it an appropriate tool;
* Julia is not widely known, and other people may benefit from discovering something about Julia, just as I did.
How should I share my enthusiasm (and, with luck, bring Julia to someone who would enjoy it) without promulgating preachy blindsighted hype? Do I have to wait for a big language release?
The parent comment hints at a knife's edge that must be walked when telling people about Julia. Anything like "I use Julia for X" or "in Julia you can do Y this way" is--understandably!--met with "okay, but why Julia at all; why not a more mainstream tool like Python?" But if you elaborate with "I use Julia for X because I find that in this case Julia > Python for reason Z," you risk being labeled an anti-Python zealot.
So, serious question to the parent comment author or others who feel similarly: what are some ways in which you would find it non-offputting for the Julia community to share its enthusiasm or experience with a broader audience?
My own impression of the Julia community has been rather pleasant. I think they are actually almost too humble and comfortable with their niche. Rust is... the polar opposite?
YMMV.
These are all independent pieces that were written at different times by different people.
Where do you see the arrogance in the OP? It's showing exactly what's being claimed
The "unreasonable effectiveness" article wasn't, to my knowledge, by a community member. It's normal for magazines to have enthusiastic headlines.
You're making a lot of assumptions here that aren't very kind or well supported.
What you were referring to is a talk by a core developer at JuliaCon 2019 titled 'The unreasonable effectiveness of multiple dispatch' [1], which has less of a fanboy-vibe imho.
Edit: Oh. I didn't notice the arstechnica article had this exact title. That's a bit cheap...
Julia is a delightful combination of ease of use, clarity, and performance. It lets one concentrate much more on the problem at hand than language related boilerplate (I’m looking at you, Rust).
I’m hopeful that Julia will become one of the most used general purpose programming languages in the long run. It’s certainly got what it takes!
>But what we will see in this example is that Julia does not always act like other scripting languages. There are some "lunches lost" that we will have to understand. Understanding how this design decision effects the way you must code is crucial to producing efficient Julia code.
This is more about how the compilation process is working to both help people understand how to write optimal code and to understand what optimizing compilers need in order to work. The engineering trade-offs, like slow performance of globals, errors in functions that would change types, etc. are all demonstrated. If you read a full description of the engineering trade-offs and think that it's a marketing tool, then you must think it made the right trade-offs? I don't understand why that would be bad.
Edit: I’m not being snarky. Such a list or view could be useful to get the pulse of the times on HN.
How many people know that loading the graph plotting library takes 30 seconds, and that is working as intended?
https://github.com/GiovineItalia/Gadfly.jl/issues/251
I've tried to use Julia a number of times and the experience is always worse than Matlab.
Compile times have dropped precipitously, around 5 sec on master for plots.jl. less than one second if you use the package compiler.
This doesn't purport to be a review of Julia, it's one small part of a tutorial series so not sure why you are expecting a discussion of every trade-off.
Also, what part of Julia is being oversold here?
I cannot reconcile your claim with those quotations from the GitHub issue:
> It's frustrating, but I don't think it's a permanent situation. A lot of work has already been done on pre-compling Julia code, and when that's extended to packages, things should be much better.
> Making this stuff more convenient is definitely desirable and will happen.
> Agreed. But do keep in mind that the procedure I outlined allows you to avoid precisely this problem, with very little effort
> That would be nice. It will happen when someone makes it happen.
For "recent" development, there's a lot of work going into fixing latency issues and improving load times of packages generally: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pulls?q=is%3Apr+label%3Al...
https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2020/3
I assume the marketing is to try and revitalize things. I’m not clear on what The Julia developers’ profit model is, but I would assume they have incentives to promote public interest.
As I said above, There's no coordinated effort to do this.
These are all independent pieces that were written at different times by different people.
I would also be quite shocked if whoever spent $5M in seed capital for JC would not expect or demand some amount of digital marketing.
Doesn't seem to be declining.
Also, next time it's IRL the numbers would seem to indicate a huge setback, so I wouldn't use those :D