I find this characterization of julia as “not released” and “alpha” really not helpful. To the casual reader these terms signal low quality and lots of bugs, and in my experience (after 2.5 years of heavy use) those are the last two things that come to mind with respect to julia. On the contrary, I think the quality of the julia builds at this point can easily compete with things like Python or R (in terms of bugs).
I think the correct characterization of the pre-1.0 builds is that julia hasn’t reached a stable API, i.e. you need to be willing to live with breaking changes coming your way. That is a VERY different thing than a buggy alpha release! There is a large group of julia users out there that use julia for “real world” work. It is really not helpful for us if julia gets an undeserved reputation of being a pre-release, buggy thing that shouldn’t be used for “real work”. Such a reputation would question the validity of our results, whereas a reputation as “hasn’t reached a stable API” is completely harmless. Also, keep in mind that there is julia computing out there, which is feeding the core dev group. They have customers that pay them (I hope) for supported versions of julia, so it seems highly misleading to characterize julia as not released and not ready for production. Heck, you can buy a support contract for the current released version, so in my mind that seems very much released! I think it would be a good idea if the core julia group would actually put a definitive statement out on the website for this topic. There are a couple of devs that at least from the outside seem close to the core group that have made statements like the one below, that to any sloppy reader will just sound like “stay away from julia if you don’t want a bug riddled system”, and I think that really doesn’t square with the message that e.g. julia computing needs to put out there or with the state of the language. I think a good official position would be: “Current julia releases are of high quality and are ready to be used for ‘real world’ work. Pre-1.0 releases will introduce breaking API changes between 0.x versions, which might require extra work on the users part when updating to new julia versions.” Or something like that. Cheers, David -- David Anthoff University of California, Berkeley <http://www.david-anthoff.com> http://www.david-anthoff.com From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Chris Rackauckas Sent: Tuesday, September 13, 2016 9:05 AM To: julia-users <[email protected]> Subject: [julia-users] Re: Julia Users and First Customers 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
