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Comment by StefanKarpinski | Hacker News Reader

This "Julia marketing conspiracy theory" that many people on HN seem to believe is so bizarre. What big tech company do you think is behind this incredible, shrewd and presumably well-funded marketing campaign? Julia is the only new major programming language of the last decade that doesn't have a major tech giant backing it. Adoption and development are pretty much entirely grass roots. If you see a lot of enthusiastic posts about Julia on HN, that's because there are a lot of actual people out there using Julia who love it and write posts about it.

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Poor Go, Dart, Swift for Tensorflow. How is Google going to compete with Julia Computing in terms of marketing and advertising?

Trying to think of others.

Kotlin was 2011, and is JetBrains. JetBrain's is 1500 people. So big, but not giant.

Rust is 2013 Mozilla is only 750 people

So perhaps Major Tech Giant is over-stating it. But definately most other things in the last decade have a major established tech firm backing it.

Julia has basically nothing. Starting out as a MIT project, and then Julia Computing is a tiny startup; with like what 50 people now?

Hey, the Julia open source organization did have an undergrad in his senior year working part time on community management though. Can't leave that out. We don't know if JetBrain or Mozilla had something like that.

Julia Computing is about 40 people, and that is a recent thing.

Hi Lyndon. Yes, but that's exactly what I meant! I think my phrasing was off. For a company of that size, I've seen very good activity promoting the julia brand, both officially and through word-of-mouth networks. (your own Cambridge meetups notwithstanding). Therefore, I think much of the hype is at least partly that, rather than just the technical merits of the language (which I agree it has plenty). I don't remember this kind of 'buzz' before v1. Back then it was just people who saw promise in its features. Now people seem to be promoting it quite actively.

I've seen a shift in the winds, that's all I'm saying. I wasn't mean to come off so negative. (certainly not as negative as Chris took it!)

Thanks for the explanation. I feel that Julia has always been well received on HN ever since we publicly announced it in 2012. I believe that post v1, there are just more users out there and more blogs are being written, more companies are using it, more universities are teaching it, and hence more stories are making their way to HN.

Nowadays, I find new Julia stories and posts when they show up on HN (as opposed to a few years ago when all you had to do was follow juliabloggers).

@StefanKarpinski I said none of those things. I didn't mean to hit a nerve. I actually agree with you. I was one of those grassroots people who enthusiastically tried to get friends to try it. Perhaps 'shrewd marketing' didn't come off as positive as it sounded in my mind.

PS. One forgets people like Stefan and Jeff are likely to be on HN. Apologies. I'd have been a bit more careful in my choice of words otherwise.

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