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Comment by fermienrico | Hacker News Reader

Seems like you're the founder of Julia. Why such a knee jerk reaction? Did you read the benchmark page? The table of content is right at the top.

Optics of this type of reaction is seen everywhere in the Julia community. My advice is to embrace negativity around the language, try to understand if it is fabrication or legitimate, and address the shortcomings.

Julia is a beautiful language and hope some of the warts of the language gets fixed.

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When I wrote that I was under the impression that the brainfuck interpreter implementations were the only benchmarks in the repo. There are, however (I now realize), also benchmarks for base64 decoding, JSON parsing, and writing your own matmul (rather than calling a BLAS matmul, which is not generally recommended), so this is more reasonable than I thought but still a somewhat odd collection of tasks to benchmark. Of course, microbenchmarks are hard — they are all fairly arbitrary and random.

In a delightful twist, it seems that there is a Julia implementation of a Brainfuck JIT that is much faster than the fastest interpreter that is benchmarked here, so even by this somewhat esoteric benchmark, Julia ends up being absurdly fast.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26585042

I'm a daily Julia user but tbh I've gotta agree with parent commenter. I think Jeff's attitude in the "What's bad about Julia" talk is the right way to handle criticism: listen to the person, ask about their use cases, understand how Julia could be improved for that user. Accepting criticism makes a good product, and seeing project leaders do it makes a good impression.

Not my best but as I said, I was genuinely confused about the benchmarks.

Oh come now, are we really so delicate that one brusque comment gets our back up?

Does the man have to be obsequious everytime he discusses his language in an informal setting?

It's not that we're delicate, it's that poor communication between users and maintainers leads causes problems. As for "one comment", OP already mentioned that defensiveness is becoming an issue in the community.

Don't be ridiculous. If someone puts emphasis on nonsense, dismissing it is reasonable.

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