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Comment by sk2020 | Hacker News Reader

sk2020

According to githut, usage is declining. I wouldn’t read too much into it, but it is one empirical measure.

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.

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Download metrics show usage doubling every year.

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.

That only indicates downloads, though. One user might download many times for various reasons (containers come to mind). Does the Julia compiler have telemetry like .NET core that monitors it’s users?

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.

What a weird metric to use. Its not growing as fast as Python and Javascript, so the stats go down, so the conclusion is its usage is declining? I dont think it works that way.

The source data shows decline in absolute numbers for pushes. 1432 last quarter, 19073 at peak Q3 2015. It seems to flatten out in 2018 and stays in the 1500-3000 range.

Most of the work moved the package ecosystem as the standard library shrank with many of the things in there moving to separate packages (for example, even the package manager is a separate package: https://github.com/JuliaLang/Pkg.jl). The result of this is that what you now see in Julialang/julia is mostly compiler work (and some tweaks to Base things like linear algebra overloads). With that said, it's quite an actively developed compiler!

JuliaCon 2019: 500 attendees JuliaCon 2020: 20,000 attendees

Doesn't seem to be declining.

Was JuliaCon 2020 remote? That probably has more to do with it. I can’t possibly imagine there are 40X more active users in one year. The niche it serves isn’t particularly large, either.

Yes, it was completely online. The comparison doesn't make sense.

Also, next time it's IRL the numbers would seem to indicate a huge setback, so I wouldn't use those :D

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