This is why I think its mostly non-engineers commenting about how great Julia is. No one has tried to deploy it prod. Sure there might be exceptions, but if you interview 100 engineers who've tried deploying Julia, a vanishingly small % would recommend it if at all.
I'm not commenting on Julia per se. I'm commenting on the state of discussions surrounding programming languages in general.
> if you interview 100 engineers who've tried deploying Julia, a vanishingly small % would recommend it if at all.
Popularity of a choice does not correlate with a choice being correct. It is a fallacy to evaluate a particular tool's usefulness for a particular job by how popular that tool is. And doubly so when most of a random sampling of engineers includes virtually no one experienced in using said tool.
In discussions of virtually any non-popular programming language today, the vast majority of commenters on the language have absolutely 0 experience using it day in and day out for its intended use case. All you have in that discussion are hammer users. To them everything is a nail. And they universally hate any new tool that doesn't look like a hammer, because they can't take the time to learn the new tool. Why would they? Everything is a nail anyway.
This is disappointing, especially here, because Hacker News is the place where the concept of using a non-familiar language was expressed as a super-hack for startups.
My original reply expresses the conjecture that eventually, all pls will look the same and nobody will be able to develop a language that will truly provide an increase in quality, decrease development or maintenance costs, or improve the reliability and safety of systems the world runs on, because people who evaluate languages actually evaluate them for the tooling that largely gets bolted on after the fact by nonexperts (the lsp server / vscode crowd).
There are three lsp servers for python. Only one of them works with pipenv on Windows. Does that make python bad? If python were introduced today, as it was when it first came out, would it gain popularity with all the expectations we place upon a language? No. And that would be a shame. The same is true of Javascript and Java. C and c++ would go nowhere. About the only language that would have made it is Csharp and Visual Basic and Kotlin, because they were written to SELL IDEs and tools.
Well said. Also, the article starts with a litany of praise from a variety of research groups. Some of these are big projects with government funding and serious computing requirements. Julia is deployed all over the place now.
>>Popularity of a choice does not correlate with a choice being correct. It is a fallacy to evaluate a particular tool's usefulness for a particular job by how popular that tool is.
Okay but this is a very engineering-specific mindset. I encourage you to broaden your perspective. "Correctness" of a language choice is more than about the language itself. In most situations, it is better to choose a language that scores 9/10 on how well it fits the problem domain than one that scores 10/10, if the 9/10 language will let you solve the problems faster (pre-existing solutions), with less frustration (good docs) and zero need to reinvent the wheel (good libraries). This is especially true if the 9/10 language will also allow you to recruit more easily due to its popularity.
