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Comment by bachmeier | Hacker News Reader

> I’ve had a lot of frustration with the Julia community being unwilling to see faults in the language.

A related thing that really turned me off in the early days was one of the main developers constantly criticizing other languages. That wouldn't be so bad by itself, but much of it was uninformed, and it told me at least one of the core devs was not going to learn from other languages. There was always an attitude that "I know what to do, unlike everyone else".

The reason I never moved heavily into Julia was that it was too easy to write slow code (back then, things may have changed) relative to compiled languages like Fortran. Maybe I'd have stuck with it longer if I found the community to be pleasant, but an unstable and often slow language plus an unpleasant core developer was more than I was willing to put up with.

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Opposite experience here, it was crazy to me how fast I could prototype my number crunching on price series, how trivial it was to distribute it across multiple machines in my house and finally how easy it was to flip to gpu computation. On every step I was surprised how fast it was.

Community is great, met only kind people, exceptionally knowledgable bunch.

A couple of very vocal individuals have an attitude, which reflects badly. But the community is getting bigger, so it's becoming less of an issue as most interactions don't include those people.

It's still easy to write slow code. But writing fast code is often easier than it would be in C++ or whatever.

Come try again if you like.

The announcement post for Julia was literally about all the things we love in other languages:

https://julialang.org/blog/2012/02/why-we-created-julia/

There is a certain set of languages that the Julia team is experts in. But the world of languages is very diverse and big parts of it are lacking representation, so we miss out on their insights. Eg I think most core devs are experts in C, C++, Matlab, Python, but not as many experts in Haskell, OCaml, Rust, Racket, Common Lisp, Clojure.

I'd like to find ways of attracting those other experts into our community, and making sure we use their insights whenever we can.

Always good to attract experts from other languages. I was mainly addressing the claim that Julia core devs like to crap on other languages, not trying to claim that we're experts in every language — obviously we're not. But saying that we're uninterested in other languages or unwilling to learn from them is simply untrue — we're a bunch of huge programming language nerds and we love programming languages, even some of the notoriously flawed ones like C++, Matlab and Perl.

It’s easy to write slow code in any language. I wrote some slow Fortran before I learned how not to. Generally you need to know a good amount about not only the language, but about the machine you’re targeting, to write really efficient code.

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