I covered that in the Stanford comment earlier in the post. I got an early copy of this book. I do understand that julia IS being used but I’m not seeing interest in the wild. Of course I could go down to the CME and find people working with it, they aren’t stuck on C++ or Python, whatever gives them the edge. Where are all the others?
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Where are all the other whoms?
I know, I covered this in the youtube post. That only reinforces my concern. Where are all the people who can watch these wonderful courses? The python people seeking a new career? the disinchanted C++ devloper upset with all the issues that the Carbon team are about to bring up?
Interest in the wild follows big exciting widely desired specific apps / monetizable capabilities being extant and recognized. One area where Julia packages are not yet prevalent is refined and accessible Big Data processing. Julia is great at handling large amounts of data and processing it … as yet less good at making others skilled practitioners thereof. Another area for which there is nearly no activity is blockchain.
Think of this as a sampling problem:
- What is the overall size of the population?
- What is the frequency within that overall population?
- How much bias is present in the sample you’re being exposed to?
(1) is very large, (2) is still quite small and (3) seems a bit large given this thread versus my experiences. As one example of why (3) matters, I just recently met a former CFO of Goldman Sachs who’s a big Julia fan, yet you seem to be finding no one in finance.
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You sure about that python and java grew from grass routes interest. At least that’s what I saw happen. The devs in companies clustered in coffee shops and meetups and were hosted by fintech. The people paying the wages said it’s ok to experiment and we’ll fund it then came the big apps. I am looking for the grass roots interest.
If you want an example of this I cite Pandas for python.
I take the points on board and I AM finding people in finance, if you look at the prior posts I mention that and give an example of a juliaconn presentation made by a Chicago company. What I am NOT finding is grass roots interest even after 10 years. Take a look at the Chicago julia meetup group activity.
The bias in the Chicago dev population is Finance, Healthcare and service industry. We have the CME, hundreds of trading shops, Northwestern and UofC medical research. So the places I am asking in are a wash with the groups I would have thought candidates for interest. I think that covers 2 and 3. The overall size of the population I am targetting has to be in the thousands given the industries addressed above.
Not sure that’s fair, given that Julia 1.0 was released four years ago.
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I agree it was a cheap shot and I apologize. An oversimplification given that python “started” in 1980. Also my idea of a killer app is just showing up on my radar. Geniebuilder,dataframesmeta, pluto. It’s perfectly positioning julia for the citizen coder. Again I apologize.
I’m marking this as the solution as I didn’t really consider it in that manner. I anchored on 2012 and forgot that python started in 1980 and only came into it’s own ( from my perspective) in 2000.
thank you to all the people that took the time to give me food for thought. Here are my take aways.
1 meet with the Carbon briefing people and find out what their approach is.
2 go to the trading show and test the water in 2022.
3 figure out what to do next based on 1 and 2.
thanks to everyone again
“find out what their approach is” 
That is information we can use and knowledge to coddle.
who are these people by the way, “Carbon” is far too generic of a word for me to figure it out via google 
I am SURE that the wizards of julia are far more conversant regarding this topic and I have signed a stack of NDAs.
Carbon are very upfront about what they are up to and why. One of our chaps was at the public roll out session. People I trust respect the Carbon team and that make my day a tad easier. All that is happening here is that we’re chatting with people we trust, and have a proven compiler track record, about what they think. I don’t think I’m breaking the NDA’s by saying I’m going to be interested in GOVERNANCE given who’s funding this
sorry I thought this was searchable on julia discourse. I know it’s been discussed. Here’s the high level blurb carbon a question to ask yourself is this vaporware and just muddying pools for julia as the finest language in the land is about to crack the top 20
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I meant “general approach to solving some facility-like need” not anything NDA.
that’s all in the public presentation they gave our chum went to and on their carbon github area. It’s pertinent that at no point do they seem to refer to julia. I also note that fridman or Carmak didn’t mention julia at all.
This is a good thread.
The way I see Julia and how it relates to other programming languages is simple:
- Julia in my view, is the best guy but he’s an “introvert”. He knows more than a lot of his folks does, but he just wants to do his stuff with his “smart friends” who knows him so well.
- Then you have others who know a little, but they’ve sold themselves so well, you begin to think if they’re really the best.
In my view, Julia is “warm” in relation to how it approaches it “marketing”. I just don’t understand how a language that is designed so beautifully and just too numerous benefits to mention isn’t “out” there yet.
They say its still “young”. Its “young” if you relate it to adoption rate. But “adoption” is not “awareness”. “Rust” isn’t used everywhere, but I’m sure 80% of the developer community knows of it.
RUST IS JUST 12 YEARS OLD, JUST 2 ABOVE JULIA.
Julia is young and it won’t be adopted easily, yes we all know that. But for “awareness”, I’m dumbfounded.
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Rust awareness enormously benefited from the notoriety of Mozilla, which advertised it high and low especially at the beginning. In the same way that Go, another young language, only gained so much fame because it’s backed by Google. Julia doesn’t have such a well-known organisation pushing for its usage. That it’s already so well known despite starting basically with a handicap in that area says something about the value of the language itself! But if you want to play with the big guys, you need to get the support of the big guys, there’s no way around it. Developers aren’t immune to propaganda.
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This is an interesting take. I think it has a lot of truth to it (and it definitely describes people like myself). And it’s partly because of the audience it targets. IMHO it also comes from its heritage in LISP which has always been a language family for high end intellectuals so to speak. It was designed originally with the goal of working on computer algebra and formal proof systems, computing theory, etc.
IMHO the great thing about Julia is it’s the language that bridges algebraic and analytic thinking. Algebraic thinking is sort of about structure, symbols, logic, language… Analytic thinking is about numbers, magnitude, convergence, approximation… Julia is about giving people a language/structure/symbol system to describe numbers, magnitude, convergence, approximations…
A lot of people are one-or-the-other. The “analysts” tend to just use FORTRAN, the “algebraists” use LISP or Haskell or OCaml or something… Julia is a little more niche than other languages in that it’s designed for and by people who move fluidly back and forth between language/symbols/structure and numbers/convergence/approximation thinking. The widespread adoption of Macros for example is really an algebraic sort of thinking, but then the fast matrix math and differential programming and etc is all about analysis.
I suspect the world of people who can move fluidly between these modes of thinking is not about to dramatically widen. I’d just be happy if we can recruit all the algebraic/analyst polyglots to use Julia.
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When will the community stop this kind of responses to genuine “perceived problems”.
Countless times, on hacker news and everywhere you can think of, the community as been seen as people who know best how to tell you “what you’re doing wrong” or how “you’re not using Julia the right way.”
Julia isn’t getting the adoption it ought to be getting judging by how powerful the language is. I see this as a problem (often like calling it “challenges”) and as the author of the thread pointed out, he also sees it as one and wants to help. Jeremy Howard in his talk also saw it as a problem. I just don’t understand how people don’t want to admit.
Stop giving reasons why others “succeeded”, Julia isn’t an handicap and if it cares to know what it cares, it will succeed too.
We must be positive-minded, but that doesn’t cancels seeing challenges and tackling them. Yes, “ADOPTION” is backed by “big guys”, but then “AWARENESS” isn’t. That’s the point the author is trying to make - GET THE WORD OUT THERE ABOUT JULIA.
Every language has their own story, that isn’t our concern, we must strive to make JULIA what it deserves.