Comment by blindseer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blindseer | Hacker News Reader

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Another massive frustration for me is that Julia has no formal way to say "here are public functions and these are private" but does have a completely orthogonal way of saying "these are functions that will populate your global namespace if you use `using`", i.e. `export variable_name`, and people absolutely confuse the hell out of these. I don't think there's even agreement in the Julia community if you should use `export` for your public API or not.

And if you misspell the exports or change the variable in question, Julia won't even warn you about it. That is straight crazy behavior to me, and I still don't understand how that hasn't been changed.

The `using` + `import` packages in Julia combined with how `export`s work make it SUCH a confusing and frustrating experience for beginners in Julia.

I personally like mathematical symbols when I'm writing and reading code in my domain, but I do feel very lost when I'm reading Julia code outside of my area of expertise. All my colleagues hate it too (hard to grep, hard to type if you don't know the math and are just a software engineer) and I'm coming around to the idea of not using it or documenting it explicitly.

The fact that mutable structs are easier to use but immutable structs are more performant, the lack of composition of fields the way Go handles it, the lack of traits or interfaces, the sorry state of compilation time, the non existent tooling all lead a beginner / intermediate Julia developer in the wrong direction in my opinion. It's very easy to write code that is straight up broken or just not efficient in Julia, and that's probably why I won't pick it for a big project going forward.

But I'm still keeping my eye on it. Maybe in 5 years it'll be the language for a lot of the jobs?

I use export for my public functions. What is wrong with that? How exactly does Python signal what is public? Nothing but conventions like underscore, which btw Julia developers use as well. If I really really don't want somebody to use a function, I might underscore it but generally I don't see the point.

The underscore naming convention is far from ubiquitous in either the Python or Julia communities.

The more practical indicator of a function being "public" is whether or not it appears in the published API documentation. Unlike Julia, Python projects are more likely to have complete documentation (or even documentation at all). So there is a better understanding of what "public" means in Python. Without docs, it's a guessing game.

I agree documentation is a problem with Julia, but I dislike the lack of nuance when people discuss this. There is no doubt in my mind that the core Julia libraries are far better documented than the Python equivalents.

Just do something simple like looking up help on `print` in the REPL on Python and Julia. The Python documentation is very primitive compared to what you get in Julia.

Julia has a better standard documentation system than Python and have in the standard library started a better convention for how to document things which means that as this spreads out to other third party libraries, Julia has the potential to be better documented than Python.

What you see today is immaturity rather than signs of an inherently bad system.

There are effectively private functions in python though.

Double underscores before the name makes it impossible to call them from the outside. It's more like typescripts private however, so it's still technically possible to call these functions in a specific way, it just won't happen on accident.

Yeah I really want to like Julia but for all the reasons you mentioned I’ll just use python. Also python is making a ton of improvements and looks better by the day

You list some reasonable criticisms, but how is 'immutable structs are more performant' a valid criticism? That's just because compilers can do more optimizations with immutables. Unless you want immutables to be intentionally hobbled, what exactly do you expect the Julia devs to do about it?

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