I have loved learning to use Julia. It has forced me to think more deeply about types and optimizations. There are things that I still don’t love but I have “bought in” to the julia paradigm and spent quite a bit of time re-writing python code in julia. Every once in a while, I get a little nervous and think, "What if the development/progress of julia just falls off a cliff and version releases/support just stop? Will all my time have been wasted? What are the chances of this happening in your opinion? Anyone have their finger on the pulse of the development community/ language in general?
it’s continuously and actively developed by dozens of people (to the core language) and thousands of people (to the ecosystem). I’ve very much enjoyed being a part of this helpful and growing community
but for the sake of hypothetical let’s say a meteor hits every active Julia user, and every server with any backup of the source code…
Will all my time have been wasted?
no! because it’s the journey that counts and you’ll have learned something along the way
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Love it!! Not exactly the answer I was looking for though.
Thinking about types and optimizations transfers to quite a few languages. Julia exists for good reason, but it’s not radical to the point that you have to sacrifice most of your knowledge to use another language. If Julia really does become a stagnant language, a possibility for any language no matter how popular it once got, your legacy codebase will at least keep working on the supported platforms if you did your due diligence with environments and enough people need Julia code enough to maintain repos. Basically nobody is using COBOL for new code anymore, but nobody can afford to stop using it either.
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Here is my answer in a similar thread, and you should be able to find many related discussions: How do we Julians win big when the situation is so unfair? - #74 by stevengj
Probably this thread should have a time limit, as we’ve seen from experience that such topics often spin on endlessly otherwise.
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Just to add one more angle here – it seems clear to me that Julia is beyond a tipping point as far as long term use is concerned. I have no predictions for if Julia will totally supplant Matlab, Python, or C++, but it seems very reasonable to think that labs that have moved to Julia will continue to find Julia extremely useful. Companies that have written simulations in Julia and built workflows around researcher to engineer handoffs all within one language probably won’t all go under or completely rework their architecture.
Julia isn’t nearly as wide spread as COBOL was back in the day, yet I think there is reason to believe the same inertial effects apply.
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I appreciate the link to the prior discussion, @stevengj – as someone relatively new to Julia (but old to software engineering), as well, it’s hard not to wonder about this, so the discussions are informative. In particular in that prior thread, there were two points that stood out to me – the first response:
Make the community and language more friendly to non-scientific software engineers.
and this:
If I could suggest where this discussion goes from here, what are you yourself doing so Julia can win big?
Couldn’t agree more. We (the community) need to continue to make it more compelling for scientists and engineers, while also recognizing Julia’s potential as a general-purpose language beyond science and engineering. So, why not be the next Visual Basic? (Hey, don’t groan… many of us started there, and there’s an opening for a worthy successor… note this link is from Retool, makers of internal tools, like you might have historically made with VB. What about internal tools for scientists and engineers? Or both…).