Why We Use Julia, 10 Years Later

Why We Use Julia, 10 Years Later
julialang.org

- But the REPL lacks the ability to redefine structs on the go (which I can understand as it'd be tough to do, or simply not possible). But that, combined with the slow start up time makes life a bit harder than it should. Fortunately, one doesn't redefine its structs every day.

- There are also lots of libraries but the quality of the documentation is often sub par. For a newcomer like me, working examples would be great. For example, if you use the plots library, you'll have hard time finding a list of all possible plots (the documentation talks about lots of things, but strangely, not a list of possible charts). I've also looked at doing linear regression and GLM and, again, you've code libraries but the examples are rare...

- the startup time are still quite slow but that's ok because somehow you adapt your workflow around.

- being able to use greek symbols as identifiers is super cool but your editor as to manage that, else you'll have to memorize shortcuts...

But still, I keep on using it, it's much faster for my use case (data processing). I mean, faster than r or Python (for which I could write fast code but that'd mean I'd have to change the way it is written)

The normal thing today is comparing Julia to R, Matlab and Python. But my intro to Julia was actually trying to convert code examples in the O'Reilly book: "Exploring Everyday Things with R and Ruby: Learning About Everyday Things" to Julia.

I thought that worked quite nicely and that the Julia code looked a lot nicer than the Ruby code. It made me write a follow up blog post a few days later: https://assoc.tumblr.com/post/71454527084/cool-things-you-ca...

Unlike your typical Julia user I was always into programming because I wanted to make computer games. I liked playing with Game engine architectures and those exposed me to the problem of handling collision between objects of different types. Multiple-dispatch solves that problem very elegantly. Traditional object-oriented languages are pretty bad at it.

From the perspective of writing clean and expressive code, this really won me over to Julia early on before I had done much serious work with it.

It became my goto language for writing Unix tools, replacing Go, Ruby and Python.