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Comment by Moissanite | Hacker News Reader

Julia is too "trendy" in certain circles (finance bros) for a lot of scientific computing types to take it seriously and invest a lot of time into it. There are the same sort of community brigading problems that people complain about Rust for, but without the balancing effect of "this language is considered the future by many giant companies who actually have some motivation for being cautious with their choices".

I first heard about Julia in about 2012, and while visibility has grown massively, I haven't seen anyone putting it into production or widespread use in any company or academic group except for where you have someone who wants to be an "influencer" trying their luck.

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Ah yes, nobody uses Julia in production... except these companies https://juliahub.com/case-studies/ and many more—it's impossible to keep up. It's 2023, Julia was #21 on the TIOBE index at some point last year. Claiming that nobody uses Julia in production at this point is getting to be rather silly.

Found a few (energy and pharma) I've heard of who aren't in the already mentioned "finance bro" category, or academia - but those are singular use-cases. The fact that the list of notable use-cases is small enough to be worth compiling is, itself, telling.

Edit: To be clear; when I first heard about Julia I was excited and a bit sad it had come into my awareness a bit too late for me to use in my PhD. However, since then I see it come up more and more, yet the core UX things which were regarded as "not quite as good as python" seem to persist. Some things need to change in order for the language to get over the next hump of acceptance, and I feel like a community who are very hostile to outside opinions is a major one.

Ah, what an excellent catch-22! If you don't have a list of notable use cases, people claim that there are no serious users. If you make a list of notable use cases, then the fact that you compiled such a list is "telling". Debunking oft-repeated falsehoods is significantly different from being "hostile to outside opinions".

Is there a list of Python users somewhere? What about Fortran?

You are exemplifying one of the points from my original post quite well though, so thanks, I guess.

For others who might not know you as a co-creator of the language with a strong financial interest in its success, don't you think your comments on Julia ought to carry a disclaimer?

Your group have clearly done fantastic work, but having such centralised (and "vocal") management makes it feel more like Julia is a start-up whose product is a language, rather than a language which a spin-out company is commercialising a bit. I trust the former far less than the latter.

Why would mentioning facts require a disclaimer? I mean, unless you embrace the genetic fallacy?

> Is there a list of Python users somewhere?

Yes! You can find them all over. https://brainstation.io/career-guides/who-uses-python-today#.... for example. People compile incomplete lists for the answer of "do people use X?" It's never expected that the lists are complete. This is the most bizarre comment thread I've ever read.

> but having such centralised (and "vocal") management makes it feel more like Julia is a start-up whose product is a language, rather than a language which a spin-out company is commercialising a bit

Okay... then just read a different source? There's tons of these things online. Stefan just referenced the one he knows the URL of because he's involved with it. But here's a random one. https://www.datacamp.com/blog/the-rise-of-julia-is-it-worth-.... Each package ecosystem tends to have a list, like SciML has a (very incomplete, probably less than 2% listed here according to analytics) list https://sciml.ai/showcase/. There's lists all over.

I used Julia in production on my old job. My friend uses it in her current job in production (they have a product based on Julia). Neither of those companies are on the list.

I doubt any list you'll get is complete. It's more a list of examples

Of course it's not complete. Everyone here understands that, except the person making these ludicrous "points".

This one fascinated me a few months ago when I came across it: https://juliahub.com/case-studies/lincoln-labs/

>The fact that the list of notable use-cases is small enough to be worth compiling is, itself, telling.

lol, no.

In one of the recent JuliaCon presentations I caught that ASML uses Julia for their telemetry in production. Seems weird to use Julia for telemetry specifically, until you understand that for ASML telemetry involves heavy physics modelling. Lenses, robotics arms, chemical reactions, lasers, it's all part of what "telemetry" is at ASML.

You have to understand, random commenters in HN have very high standards, not like those amateurs at ASML /s

> Julia is too "trendy" in certain circles (finance bros) for a lot of scientific computing types to take it seriously and invest a lot of time into it.

Isn’t that either ironic or hypocritical? Rejecting something out of hand because too many people like it is just as superficial as embracing something on account of many people liking it.

Either try it and reject it, or ignore it. But Too Trendy is not a good reason.

Not particularly my opinion, just an observation - when I've brought it up with physicist friends, they only knew the language as something Quants play with. Then again, physicists are weird - they seem to reach for C++ more often than Fortran.

May I introduce a counterexample? I worked for 21 years as a computational physicist for the DoD. I never saw or heard about anyone using a C++ program. Everything was in Fortran, except for a special-purpose C dialect that we used for programming the Connection Machine. I understand that C++ is used in analysis of high energy physics experiments, though (although I’ve also heard that it‘s being phased out).

I know of some large-scale physics simulations that are using Julia, and it’s widely considered the language to use for new projects. It’s what I use now for my physics hobby projects. I’d never heard about its finance-bro associations. And if I had, why would I give a crap?

we're actively trying to move more end-users of high energy physics (HEP) into Julia https://github.com/JuliaHEP/

Ah, but you see, Julia is both too popular and not popular enough! It's too popular with the wrong people (bad unserious people) and not popular enough with the right people (good serious people).

> I haven't seen anyone putting it into production

I keep hearing this meme. My company uses it in production.

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