Julia Language v0.3 Improves Technical Computing

[TheBlackCat]

Remember, R was slow and steady with its popularity. It was certainly not a boom, and its packages were not available from day one. The syntax were not familiar, and it isn't too easy to pick up (compared to MATLAB and Python). But it worked very well. I would say Julia, with 2 years old, has a good amount of packages already, with a good community working on them. This may be an uphill battle, but Julia delivers today what it promisses, even if it's not close to finished.

That is great. If Julia ends up succeeding, it would be wonderful. It really has some nice features. But my point is that it won't live or die based on its technical abilities. It will live or die based on whether it is able to attract a large enough community. Whether it can do that remains to be seen.

The reason I am reluctant to invest time in learning it isn't because it is hard, it is because I don't have the time to learn a language I won't use, and I don't have any intention of using a language without a proven track-record. I want to be sure that, ten years down the road, the language will still be readily available for running my code. I know that with python. I know that with Matlab. I know that with Perl, R, and Igor (none of which I can program in). But I don't know that with Julia. It is just too young and has too small of a community at this point for its future to be guaranteed. Technically superior languages appear and disappear all the time. I hope Julia isn't one of them, but at the current time there is no way to tell.

[Akka]

It has no TCO. Before they implement that I don't touch it. The big fail with python yet another time...