Comment by etrain | Hacker News Reader

Comment by etrain | Hacker News Reader

I've been following Julia for over a year (basically since their first public announcement), and I'm genuinely impressed with the team, their attitude, and their approach to designing a new language. Their performance numbers (on microbenchmarks) are awesome. The use of LLVM shows sensibility and pragmatism, and while I don't yet fully grok the type system, I think they're on the right track. I'm also really excited to see a couple of experienced R guys (John Myles White and Harlan Harris) join the Julia bandwagon. Despite the lack of a convincing story when it comes to distributed computing, it's a really promising project.

But, when I think about pushing a significant project on Julia, it feels really risky. I think it feels like betting on Python in 1995 would have. Sure, sitting here today the decision should have seemed obvious, but how many promising languages rose and died in the same timeframe?

I think Julia is a pretty good bet. Its target audience seems to love it. I've got too much on my plate right now to put the hours in on it.

Sure, you have to manage risks, but why not put insignificant but necessary projects on it? Just pick a few that someone can rewrite in a day or two if needed. (This is of course assuming you're part of the target audience and not just looking for a new web framework, but it doesn't sound like that's the case.)

I think getting a usable web stack on julia will take it a long way in terms of making it useful for problems at-scale.

My major nitpick with julia so far, if I can be real, is that its package tooling isn't enough like npm. <_< While this gives away my obvious biases, I do think that spending time on making a really good package ecosystem is important, and is something not enough people take seriously.

What's so good about npm?

It's easy for non-ops people to install packages, but I'm not sure it is easy to do large scale deployments. I'm not hating on npm, but there is still a lot to do with managing all of the dependencies in a way that makes it easy to deploy consistent packages. Pip doesn't solve this problem either, so it isn't unique to npm.

There are some tools for using npm for large scale deployments. Packages are scoped locally to an app, you can bundle them if you want, and there's a "shrinkwrap" command for making sure the installed deps are exactly the same every time. Personally, I would either go with, "peg every version to an exact semver" or "bundle ALL the deps".

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