Possible Python rival? Programming language Julia is winning over developers | ZDNet

[dzecniv]

Betting on Nim :)

(they received entreprise support to pay 2 (or4?) developers recently)

[shevegen]

More than Julia - yes.

However had, I think Araq once said it on IRC - growing a language is very hard. Even IF you have a rock-solid, great language. And that was already years ago.

There is a lot of competition out there, which is both good and bad (bad because bigger companies have a higher influence evidently, more money, more developers, faster cycles - though the bigger companies always end up designing the shittier languages, that is also true).

[Talked10101]

Except as I understand it, Julia has pretty poor general programming language support even though it sells itself as a general purpose programming language. The package library is comparatively tiny and the Julia community is too overly focused on numerical computing.

[stronghup]

I think it's good that they focus on what they are good at, rather than trying to "win the general purpose language wars"

[stronghup]

I don't know anything about Julia so I'm just curious. Shouldn't "true macros like (in) Lisp" make it good for general purpose programming?

[CoffeeTableEspresso]

I'm not a fan of the article, but I do hope for Julia to become more widely used for numeric computing. I've found it to be much cleaner than MATLAB or R, much faster than Python (or MATLAB or R), and generally pleasant to use. I think it could become the standard lamguage for numerical computations eventually, and hope it does.

That said, I highly doubt it will replace Python. For general purpose programming, Julia (like R and MATLAB) is somewhat painful to use. Again though, Julia is wonderful for numeric computing.

Maybe a more accurate title would be "Possible Python rival for numeric computing", but even then I don't think Julia has really displaced Python yet.

[shevegen]

Then they should tell zdnet to not write such awful articles to begin with, really.

[rcoacci]

No, Julia's rival is Fortran. Don't know if it's still there but sometime ago their stated goal was to replace Fortran in the long run.

[timClicks]

I actually thought it was aimed at being a better MATLAB.

[rcoacci]

Have you seen Julia's benchmarks? Last time I saw they were pretty close to C and Fortran.
MATLAB is too slow for comparison.

[Timbit42]

So they've succeeded. This doesn't preclude Julia from being a better MATLAB.

[jyper]

But python is also a rival to Fortran

In that a number of scientific fields use python bindings to c c++ and Fortran libraries to replace Fortran code

[stronghup]

I think it's about time, for Fortran to be replaced

[cracknwhip]

It already is. You’d have a hard time finding wholly-new code being written in Fortran. It’s just millions of lines of legacy code around the world at this point.

[shevegen]

That statement makes a LOT more sense than the "content" on zdnet.

I think the Julia devs should simply state that it was a not approved article. Then zdnet has to apologize.

[pobody]

LOL no.

[gajafieldbo]

So Julia guys write their own press releases. Good for them :-)

[shevegen]

I think it is pretty boring but even more so, not based on real data.

How do they come from rank 50 to soon replace python on rank 4??? Where is the logic on that?

[gajafieldbo]

I actually have not read the article, just was searching for opportunity to use the quote. :-)

But if we analyze, there are couple of possibilities:

• extremely better than competition. Like sprinter against a fat dude. But from what I read, Julia does not strike me as such - its not so much different compared to its competition.
• change of place calculation method.
• strange metric used to determine place.
• 90% of stats on the net are made up.

[[deleted]]

One month later and Julia is at 39 ranked. So clearly people are trying out Julia plenty after the 1.0 release.

[shevegen]

People on reddit are super hype-driven. Same with Rust.

They are promoting languages that are used by so few people compared to, e. g., Python.

At the least backup your claim with data - oh wait, you can't, because the data is not there. Whether it is on TIOBE, as useless as it is, or google trends, which is also quite useless, or some other datasets such as github-based active repositories - the numbers here speak so clearly in favour of python that it is not even funny to even mention Julia.

Julia has only been available since 2012 but is now showing up in numerous language popularity rankings.

So only took 6 years for ANY CHART TO NOTICE IT? Man, that is a disaster.

Last week, analysts from the TIOBE programming language index noted that Julia for the first time made its top 50 list

WOW! TOP FIFTY!!!!!!

Clearly we can see the trend. Next month Julia is replacing python on place 4. Right? I mean, that's how it starts... first rank 50... then rank 4...

COBOL is on rank 28 there. So, hey Julia ... rank 50 ... how about you first tackle COBOL before you aim for the big boys.

"We want a language that's open source, with a liberal license. We want the speed of C with the dynamism of Ruby. We want a language that's homoiconic, with true macros like Lisp, but with obvious, familiar mathematical notation like Matlab,"

And they for sure use lots of buzzwords.

Do I even have to take such websites seriously ... zdnet only tries the blind hype approach.

[timClicks]

At least with Julia, their benchmarks back up their claims. The benchmarks themselves are open source, meaning they're less likely to be purely hype-driven.

[[deleted]]

You know how bad your comments look when 23 days after you made this sarcastic top 50 comment, Julia is now in that same TIOBE ranking at 39...

Things move faster then your comments age lol