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Comment by gugagore | Hacker News Reader

It is amazing and frustrating to me how much latency affects my productivity. I wish I could more effortlessly switch between tasks, or just meditate and relax while I wait for something I just did on the REPL to finish. But I don't. More often than not, a 30-second delay to e.g. plot something destroys my ability to stay in a productive zone.

I have been using Julia 1.6 since the release, and I'm so grateful not only that some computations run a bit faster, but that the interactivity is so improved.

Even seeing a progress bar can help me stay focused, because it can be fun to watch (parallel precompilation is especially fun). When a command just hangs, I feel left in the dark about how much boredom I'll have to endure.

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Very interesting UX observations on interactive programming.

Kinda like mirrors in waiting areas, I wonder whether judicious logging messages about the compilation process (not a wall of text, but just enough) will serve to keep users engaged while also educating them about the compilation happening on the backend. That will help users feel more agency, and also improve their mental models of how to structure their code/activity for faster compilation.

That actually helps. Talking from years of experience doing Android development, where in the early days (and still on some projects) you would have +5 minute rebuild time, and it's supper annoying to check minor things. Having more logs actually helped it seem faster, even tho it wouldn't be, but also you could know where you are stuck and why, which helps identify bottlenecks in build processes.

Sometimes it would be enough to just google what the long task does and see "oh wait I don't actually need that step for my daily development" (e.g. resource crunching, crash reporting initalization etc) or point you in the direction of "why isn't this caching itself".

Quite a useful thing, and should be available as an option at least. In a REPL it might be context noise, but should still be there as a --verbose option.

This is the theory behind spinners over separate page loads.

This is why git was such a game changer. Making a commit to SVN took a considerable amount of time, especially back in the day on slow internet connections. Making a commit with git is generally instant and doesn't break flow. It changes the way you work. People used to avoid committing with SVN, sometimes doing it only once a day. That seems completely insane now.

I have very little tolerance for latency in my tools. It's one of the top deciding factors for me when choosing which tools to use. It's that important.

Well as one of the aims as I understand it for Julia was as an alternate to Fortran.

You should consider your self lucky when I started the compile link process took a while and that is assuming you had real time access.

I recall one of my colleagues who was running her code on an ICL at AWE (Underwater Weapons Establishment) coming into the terminal room logging in and sighing "48 jobs in GEORGE ahead of hers.

A year later we brought a Pr1me Super Mini which made things a lot faster.

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