Hello,
I’m just learning Julia and I really like it, but I have a few criticisms:
1- Why are there so few books on learning this language and why has the development team focused all its attention on developing Julia? This reminds me of the Xen hypervisor. They have designed a great hypervisor, but the documentation is very sparse and outdated.
2- Please launch the dedicated online Julia compiler.
3- Please consider writing books on Boboinformatics, security, and systems programming with Julia. Most Boboinformatics books are in R and Python.
Thank you.
I am not a Julia developer (yet?), since I did not yet open a PR on the main repository.
But as for point 1, you can find a list of books at Books. I am sure if you pay someone to write a book.
As for point 2, this was discussed in your old thread at Julia online compiler in November, where (if I remember correctly) the main conclusions were that both financing and maintenance/security are major aspects someone first has to solve.
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hi @hak3rcon, would you be ok changing the title to something like Criticism of the Julia development experience ? just to make it feel a bit less targeted at individual humans 
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I feel like discussion of this might turn into a rehash of your earlier thread Julia online compiler, in terms of discussing developer resources/allocation (for example, who is the Julia development team?).
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@hack3rcon, you’ve posted many topics here and gotten many patient, considered, and detailed responses — responding both to specific programming help questions as well as general discussion about the community itself. In addition to your previous Julia online compiler topic, you’ve also been pointed to previous topics on learning the language, too.
I’ve also previously requested that you put more effort into your posts here. I even explicitly asked that you look for previous discussions — and that includes your own. We don’t need folks spending more of their time here.
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I will add this very explicitly to head off more requests about this: we have done this before several times in several ways, and we do not at this time think it’s worth it to offer a free online Julia compute experience. I get that you think it’s crucial or whatever, and I cannot argue with an opinion, but that’s not the very well-informed opinion of Julia’s core developers. We are all very aware of what the benefits and the costs are and do not think this is worth the time and effort to make it work.
Back in the day, JuliaHub did offer a free service called JuliaBox that let people run Julia in a Jupyter notebook online that had good startup time and plotting and all that. But it was hard to develop, expensive to run, and it was before the bitcoin miners ruined everything. Since the advent of bitcoin, offering any kind of free compute is an absolute nightmare—the miners will be on anything free in no time and it takes constant vigilance to keep them away. If you don’t keep them away, the service becomes unusable for regular users. Whose job is it going to be to keep the bitcoin miners away?
Letting people run Julia in their own browser via WASM is a possibility, and a very cool one at that. But it’s just a massive amount of compiler and tooling effort to get that working. If someone wants to do it or pay for it, that would be cool, but so far no one cares about it enough to do that. I don’t think most people have any concept how expensive it would be to develop this. At least one full year’s salary of someone who is very good at compiler stuff. It’s also very unclear that it would have most of the capabilities that people expect from Julia. E.g. how would plotting work? At best I think you could get a simple text REPL working with no network.
Finally, why do you need this? This is essentially a gimmick. Yes, it’s cool that it can be done, but no one is going to actually use Julia in anger in a free online sandbox. Most people have extremely powerful multicore laptops these days. Instead we’ve focused on making the Julia installation experience as easy as possible. All you have to do is run one command and you’ll have a working Julia installed. One more pkg install command and you’ll have a working graphics stack in a few minutes. Or a fully working GPU toolchain. And it JUST WORKS. That is—frankly—fucking amazing. JuliaBox was kind of necessary back when we ran it because it was hard to get a working Julia setup with plotting and everything installed. But today? It’s so easy and reliable. Just install Julia and try it.
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