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Comment by tastyminerals2 | Hacker News Reader

I like to explore alternatives to Python and Julia has been one of the tools I am waiting to become mature enough to actually invest some time in. But every time I start reading threads, I see the comments from actual users reporting about half an hour minutes and “coffee time” project compilation. Then the dreaded ecosystem problem. Then I think to myself, well, it’s not the time yet.

Also, I wish Julia was as popular in Europe as it is overseas.

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Could you elaborate on the ecosystem problem? For my corner of the world, Julia probably has one of the highest quality ecosystem (differential equations, physics modeling, autodiff through very complicated code, probabilistic programming, SIMD/multithreading, and wonderful plotting libraries (the Makie.jl ecosystem) and good data wrangling capabilities (the Dataframes.jl ecosystem)).

I am curious what are the fields where it is less well developed?

> I am curious what are the fields where it is less well developed?

Data engineering and cloud integration is a big one. It has very few tools in that domain, and I say this as a heavy Julia user (hobby).

I've heard about cloud integration as an issue before, but what is "data engineering"?

working with databases, streaming data around with stuff like kafka or snowflake, integration with orchestrators like prefect or dagster, robust interfaces for spark, being able to read a directory of parquet files without the GC going insane, this kind of thing

I know there are some existing packages that nominally do some of these things, but generally they are understaffed and not fully mature. I love Julia as a language, so I hope this will improve over time. I think it's one of those problems that just requires more adoption before it can be fixed, and things like precompile TTFX improvements in 1.9 are a good way to get that!

And now this comment is one of those, even though it's not actually based on trying out the new release.

There seems to be significant activity around ASML in the Netherlands: https://info.juliahub.com/sciml-asml-lounge-eindhoven-meetup

yeah. they have about 700 Julia users and are in the early phases of trying to switch all their code to Julia.

Honestly, I'd stick with python or learn a statically compiled language to broaden your world. I spent years in the Julia situation and it's more of a cult than anything else. If you ever end up with a job asking for Julia(not likely), you can pick it up in a week or so of free time after some muscle memory kicks in.

> I spent years in the Julia situation and it's more of a cult than anything else

What is a "Julia situation" and how is a programming language a cult? It's used by companies, programmers, scientists, etc. to do stuff. This is a strange take.

Hop into any of the Julia communities online. Hang out for a month. It's very culty.

Source: just trust me, bro.

I offered you a simple test you can perform so you can trust yourself after performing it.

You offered nothing besides FUD. I regularly read the forums and I don't know what you're referring to.

Get involved in the community. You'll see. This isn't FUD. It's observations of someone who has been very active in the community since well before the 1.0 release.

Cult? That's a very bad take. It's a tool, great for some stuff, rough edges here and there.

People invest huge amount of effort fixing Python's shortcomings (pyspark, tf, jax, mojo) requiring a completely different way of thinking modulo the syntax. And nobody is talking about the "cult of the snake"

It's not culty to make packages for a language. It is culty to work 12 hrs a day to appease Julia computing for free to have your work taken renamed and offered to the community with different names on the authors list.

This is a bold statement. Can you provide references?

Sure graphs.jl used to be lightgraphs.jl. rumor has it the author was bullied out of the community for their personal beliefs which had nothing to do with graphs or programming. Then the Julia crew took the project and sunset the lightgraphs guys work. There are other cases of stuff like this happening but I'm too lazy. Just go ahead spend a few years in the community contributing, good times ahead. Keep in mind, if you aren't paying for the product you are the product.

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