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Comment by ysofunny | Hacker News Reader

isn't julia just another brand-name (™,®, and ©) python? like anaconda? or possibly the R language???

R is an open source version of S, which was a competitor to SAS.

Julia, from when I looked at it years ago was trying like a new version of Matlab or Mathematica. It was very linear-algebra focused, and were trying to replace those packages plus Fortran. They had some gimmicks like an IDE that would render mathematical notion like TeX for your matrices.

Python wasn't the obvious "Fortran killer" scientific language it is today. In fact it's arguably really weird that Python ended up winning that segment. In any case, I think Julia's been struggling since its inception.

I was in Austin while Travis Oliphant's wave from numpy led to Anaconda. After that we got to bring them in as consultants. It was wild talking to the team and hearing the inside-track dev info. It isn't a surprise to me that Python, as flexible and glue code as it is, became the Excel language of Scientific Computing.

What kinds of things did you hear from them?

Mostly the vision and ideals which became Anaconda, conda, and miniconda, as well as the translation of ideas to use cases to implementations, and some ideas that came about later in other forms or libraries (numba, pytorch).

Basically a mini/beta/in-progress version of Pycon each week.

R and S are also very linear algebra focused. R developers just try to make C++ behave like R as much as possible when they need more speed. Hence, Rcpp. Otherwise, we prefer our LISPy paradise.

Not at all? Totally different programming paradigm and performance. Certain communities pull towards Julia a lot more than others. Mostly I've seen scientific fields that require HPC but don't want to do everything in FORTRAN and C. Paging Chris Rackauckas!

Julia feels like a Matlab++ with its one based indexing and `function end` syntax Mojo is what you're thinking of

I primarily use MATLAB and what stops me from using Julia is the package management.

Also the VSCode extension has weird performance problems when trying to debug Julia code.

> what stops me from using Julia is the package management.

Can you expand on this? Julia's package manager IMO is one of the best parts of the language.

I hate with a burning passion having to manage packages myself. MATLAB comes preinstalled with everything and the kitchen sink.

Fair enough. It probably would make sense to have a Conda like release of Julia that comes out every year with a broad but curated selection of packages.

Long ago, I trawled through Matlab's docs to come up with a set of Julia packages matching what's build into Matlab: https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julia-for-matlab-users-clu...

I don't think you'd actually want to include each of those packages in a standard distro: does the average user really need to programmatically send emails or deal with Voronoi tessellations? Probably not, but I still think there's value in a batteries-included approach, especially when working with students.

No. It's not.

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