The list of packages on the Julia website, https://pkg.julialang.org/ , has plenty of packages that have either been failing for several versions, or are either only relevant for a tiny subset of people.
Does a list exist of well maintained, highly useful packages exist?
Would anyone else be interested in developing such a list? Also, we should separate them out into topics, so someone could just browse through ones in their discipline.
What would people think about having a rating system?
We have that through Github stars. It’s a “thumbs up only” system like Facebook had for the longest time. I think that’s a good way to handle it because 1-5 ratings with comments tend to lead to lots of trolls wanting to “game the system” and pull someone else down. Open source already has enough issues with haters, so I think we should stick to a system that doesn’t invite abuse.
Also, Github stars are actively tracked in other languages as well, so it’s good for Julia packages to accumulate them since that’s one of the ways our growth is being compared to other languages.
I plan on putting my own list up probably by the end of the week. It’ll be a Github README linked from my blog with explanations of why I made the choices. I’ll let people fight it out in the issues and PRs if they so please, but ultimately I’m writing a list that is my (well-informed) opinion which I hope is useful for others getting started. I’ll probably learn a thing or two from doing this.
There already is a curated list: https://github.com/svaksha/Julia.jl
I’d also recommend https://juliaobserver.com for exploring what packages are popular, which ones are trending, etc.
One thing I dislike about depending on GitHub stars though, is that people don’t remove stars from packages that are no longer maintained, so that you see lots of stars on old packages that have not been maintained, while some new package that has more functionality, and works on v0.6, isn’t as visible (one example might be Gadfly vs. Plots - unless you really want “grammar of graphics”, Plots.jl these days is the way to go for plotting).
However, I don’t know of anything better at the moment for “ranking” Julia packages
(except for curation by people using the packages)
(Note: I’m looking forward to @ChrisRackauckas’ curated list!)
I really like Julia Observer.
Is there any way we can make either this, or some other list, more visible so it’s useful to more people?
I don’t think I’m unique in never having seen these before, yet finding them very useful. Especially since they’d be most useful to those first coming to the language and trying to figure out what sort of things out side of base might be useful.
Based on what you said, I made the category sidebar on julia observer use category info from svaksha’s Julia.jl
// on desktop only
Can you give some suggestions on formatting?
I think this was definitely a step in the right direction, though
aside: @ChrisRackauckas, very interested in seeing the list!