1. Jeff Bezanson and Stefan Karpinski. I kid (though that's true). It's the 
group of MIT students who made it. You can track the early issues and kind 
of see who's involved. 
<https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues?page=348&q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aclosed> 
Very 
early on that's probably a good indicator of who's joining in when, but 
that only makes sense for very early Julia when using means also 
contributing to some extent.

2. Julia hasn't been released. Putting it in large scale production and 
treating it like it has been released is a bad idea.

3. The results advertise for itself. You go learn Julia and come back to 
your lab with faster code that was quicker to write than their 
MATLAB/Python/R code, and then everyone wants you to teach a workshop. Also 
packages seem to play a big role: a lot of people come to these forums for 
the first time to use things like JuMP.

4. Julia hasn't had its first release. 

Keep in mind Julia is still in its alpha. It doesn't even have a beta for 
v1.0 yet. That doesn't mean it's not generally usable yet, quite the 
contrary: any hacker willing to play with it will find that you can get 
some extraordinary productivity and performance gains at this point. But 
just because Julia is doing well does not mean that it has suddenly been 
released. This misconception can lead to issues like this blog post 
<https://blog.staffjoy.com/retro-on-the-julia-programming-language-7655121ea341#.w1bggaw78>.
 
Of course they had issues with Julia updating and breaking syntax: it's 
explicitly stated that Base syntax may change and many things may break 
because Julia is still in its alpha, and so there's no reason to slow down 
/ stifle development for the few who jumped the gun and wanted a stable 
release yesterday. It always ends up like people complaining that the 
alpha/beta for a video game is buggy: of course it is, that's what you 
signed up for. Remember that?

Making sure people are aware of this fact is a good thing for Julia. If 
someone's not really a programmer and doesn't want to read Github issues / 
deal with changing documentation (a lot of mathematicians / scientists), 
there's still no reason to push Julia onto them because Julia, as an 
unreleased alpha program, will change and so you will need to keep 
up-to-date with the changes. Disregarding that fact will only lead to 
misconceptions about Julia when people inevitably run into problems here. 

On Tuesday, September 13, 2016 at 7:55:51 AM UTC-7, Adeel Malik wrote:
>
> I would Like to ask few questions about Julia that I could not find it on 
> the internet. 
>
> 1) Who were the very first few users of Julia ?
>
> 2) Who were the industrial customers of Julia when it was first released? 
> Who are those industrial customers now?
>
> 3) How Julia found more users?
>
> 4) How Julia survived against Python and R at first release?
>
> It's not a homework. Anyone can answer these questions or put me at the 
> right direction that would be perfect.
>
> Thanks in advance
>
> Regards,
> Adeel
>

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