The Lisp curse is that the more expressive, powerful Lisp language doesn’t really get popular like the less expressive ones, maybe because of the lack of standardization, maybe because it’s easier to mess up? Maybe because it’s harder to document? We don’t know the validity of the Lisp curse nor the true cause, so it’s just a guess. Does it apply to Julia?
For:
- Julia is really expressive.
- Some complain about the correctness and documentation issues, maybe because Julia multiple dispatch, a more powerful paradigm, is also harder to document/test.
- Julia ecosystem is composed of smaller independent libraries rather than a few big libraries. This means some libraries may be maintained by a few or even a single dev and can no longer be maintained once the dev is gone. The documentation may also be less complete because the developer team see things from fewer perspectives. Each library also imposes its own standard which can be different from each other.
Against:
- Julia culture often induce challenge which means things don’t get “too easy”. The Greedy Julians don’t want to do something for less, they want to do more for the same. For example, they want to do source-to-source AD, inducing lots of difficulties. Maybe they want to optimize something to a ridiculous level. These can add difficulty, sometimes artificially, but it does make the library feel like something worth sharing.
- Julia makes good generics which make library easier to make and use.
What do you think? The way I see is that I want expressive languages like Julia to truly succeed. So, if there is a problem, we need to know.