I used Julia for a while and wrote a blog post about it: What do you think about this post? My Experiences with Julia - Volker Weißmann I describe my experiences using the Julia programming language and highlight its problems of bad performance and bad documentation. I find Julia code to be harder to write than most other languages.

I have trouble remembering what exactly happened. Should have written this post half a year ago. But anyways, thanks for pointing the Pkg.offline option out.

Yes, it is how it looks like. I use my notebook with moderate brightness because high brightness tire my eye very fast (and I spend a lot of time in front of it), and I often prefer black backgrounds (I always chose the dark themes when possible) but I never had a reading problem like with this tone of blue for the links.

[image] Volker_Weissmann: I used Julia for a while and wrote a blog post about it: What do you think about this post? Out of curiosity: is that meant to be your ‘goodbye’ to Julia? Edit: or in other words: did you have at least some fun with it as I sometimes have?

[image] jar1: If you fail - fail loudly. Julia routinely ignores this guideline. What does this refer to? A bunch of smaller things, I don’t remember everything. One thing being that @includeonce does raise a second error if a bad file is included twice. Another thing is that dynamic typing (without lots of type assertions) is kind of a violation of this guideline. Another thing is this

[image] goerch: Out of curiosity: is that meant to be your ‘goodbye’ to Julia? Edit: or in other words: did you have at least some fun with it as I sometimes have? Fun: Not really, Rust owns my heart. But I might use it again If I find myself in a situation where Julia is useful. That being said, I am currently leaving the beautiful world of Physics behind and am trying to find a job as a programmer outside of Physics. So I don’t know if I will find myself in a situation where Julia is useful, as its primarily science focussed.

This is a pretty good blog post. In my opinion, you hit on some sore points in Julia. You also mention some problems that are easily solvable, though. Real problems We don’t have good autogenerated docs, like cargo doc. It should be possible to create a program that reads Julia code, lists exported functions and types, which functions operate on types, etc, and links them together and create a HTML file. That would be a really nice addition to Julia. Error messages could be better in Julia TTFP is really bad, nearly everyone agrees I wish it was possible to redefine structs using Revise. It can be a real pain if you work with something stateful to have to recover the state after a forced restart I would also agree tooling could be better. It’s a bit hard to debate because it’s such a broad statement. But I often run into bugs in: Base’s code introspection functions like @code_native JET.jl Julia extension for VSCode Things that are not so bad Having typeof(x) give the whole type with tonnes of type parameters is not a problem, IMO. You can always just ask for the base type. See also https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/35543 apropos("Dict") is not the way to ask for methods with Dict. The right way is… methodwith. You can redefine functions using Revise “If you fail - fail loudly. Julia routinely ignores this guideline.” - I’m not sure what that means. Julia is pretty strict, usually, I think. .= behaving differently than = is not a bug or a misfeature IMO. I don’t think it’s confusing that changing all the elements in-place of a vector changes the content outside the scope where you did it. Python works the same way (with + vs +=). I don’t understand the problems you mention with modules. You can just include it once in the top module, then have using, right? That is, the top module includes everything, and all the other modules simply use using. That works. If your OS’s package manager uninstalls Julia, then yeah, it might also remove packages. That seems like fine behaviour to me - and also, it’s the package manager, not Julia

I think you’re hitting on a real problem but I disagree with the diagnosis as a “silent failures” problem. [image] Volker_Weissmann: Another thing is this That looks like a loud failure with an unhelpful error message. As you rightly pointed out in another bullet-point above, this is a common problem in Julia. [image] Volker_Weissmann: Another thing is that dynamic typing (without lots of type assertions) is kind of a violation of this guideline. Likewise there is a problem here, but I don’t think dynamic typing is a silent-failure problem per se, but rather a late failure problem. That is, I want to know early rather than late that my code is broken, and Julia doesn’t really offer tools to avoid that (even JET) as of 2022.

Blog post about my experiences with Julia

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jar1 April 25, 2022, 6:54pm 54

Moved to Declare functions of type

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Blog post about my experiences with Julia

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