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Comment by superbcarrot | Hacker News Reader

Is the post only based on TIOBE? The same index that currently ranks JavaScript below Visual Basic and SQL below Assembly? That ranking is off by so much that anyone who takes it seriously loses at lot of credibility from the start.

I'm not entirely on board with the Julia hype train but they certainly got some things right and both the ecosystem and the community are healthy and growing. Julia doesn't need to replace a bunch of other languages immediately to be successful. Implying that the language is dead by using the word post-mortem is just demonstrably false.

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I'm also skeptical of TIOBE but the post is not based only on that... The author seems to have been very active with the language, and even drafted a book on the subject. It seems to me that he may have a good feel or intuition for the scene; while this is not very scientific, it is miles ahead of basing an analysis on TIOBE alone. I'm going to be lurking this thread for potential counter-arguments though.

TIOBE is known to change drastically when google decides to change its search engine algorithm.

Also TIOBE is heavily squeued by the sheer number of publications containing a keyword and it does not really evaluate the content or the quality of these publications.

I've checked google trends and for Julia programming language they are showing slow increase, at least that's my guess as generic search for Julia (choosing programing language suggestion) shows decline while searching for "Julia programming language" shows increase.

Stackoverflow trends show show some increase (https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=julia), it was also high on the "most loved" list - 6th place just after Kotlin and Go, but it is very low in the "wanted" category. Seems those who use it like the language, but outside that circle there is no much interest.

By calling it post-mortem the author already showed his level of stupidity (or absence of morality). Julia is a new language that have to compete with languages that accumulated a huge ecosystem of developments and continue to grow. Of course Julia is losing in comparison right now.

I don't see any value in this article. It's a wasted time.

Maybe you should read to the end instead.

I did. I still don't get how the author's decision to not use the language is enough to declare it dead.

That’s not the only factor. Their publisher also decided there wasn’t a market for a book and declined to publish. The author also didn’t say Julia was a dead language, it just failed to realize the dream of becoming the language, and is instead just a language in a sea of many.

"Post-mortem" doesn't imply that it's dead? And also, of course there isn't a mass market for a book on a programming language that's not python and due to most learning material being available online. This is a stupid metric.

I got the impression, that he refers more to the fate of his own hopes.

The title doesn't and can't contain all the nuance of the article. Considering that books were published about data analysis in Clojure, the bar to clear for market size isn't that high. A lot of people buy books for reference even when you could learn everything online.

They might have been published, but how successful are they? I have no idea, but it's very realistic that one publisher is more risk averse while another isn't. This doesn't say anything about the language, really.

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