Get it together, guys!

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I first tried Julia a couple of years ago. I LOVE the language, but I gave up.

I tried it again a year ago. Better, but no debugger. I gave up. I could not possibly recommend it to my department without a debugger.

Tried it again now. So close to giving up.

Look, you have to solve the most basic usability issues if you want acceptance.

I tried JuliaPro 1.1.1.1. The debugger just plain didn’t work. When I said “Juno.@enter Myfunc()”, it just hung.

Finally I got acceptable results by installing the bleeding edge 1.2.0 Julia that just came out, THEN installing Juno/Atom, then following directions.

But even so, when I update a module I get some message about symbol already defined or something, and have to Ctrl-D and start a new session. Web advice says “Try Revise” so I’m trying that.

But what’s the story? If you want people to use your language, make it USABLE! That should be your top priority, not some new feature or this or that. What is this “Revise” nonsense?

I should be able to click on a download, click Install (I’m on Windows, although I also frequently use Linux), and then it just works. And it should install automatically to somewhere under C:\Program Files, not C:. And there shouldn’t be any admonition to “Set environment variables”. Just make it work!

I meant to say this in the original post. On what planet is requiring someone to type "Juno.@enter Myfunc()” a reasonable way to start a debugging session?

I really want to see this succeed, but the real world needs attention here.

I so love this language, but am so close to just throwing it in the trash for the last time. I am getting the impression that whoever is behind this is brilliant but hasn’t a clue about the real world. I so want to tell all my colleagues about Julia, but it would be like bringing home the artist boyfriend without a job.

Get a job! Then paint your masterpiece.

Your wannabe admirer,
LostInParadise

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I meant to say this in the original post. On what planet is requiring someone to type "Juno.@enter Myfunc()” a reasonable way to start a debugging session?

I really want to see this succeed, but the real world needs attention here.

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you are talking about the environment necessary to use Julia, is that right?, you are right in some points (the debbuger for example, and in the last juliacon there were some talks about this topic), and the installation on windows is not the most seamless experience in existence, but its not unbearable to in my opinion (quite the contrary, if you ask me, but we have different backgrounds).
For what i can infer, you are looking to implement the use of Julia on an engineering environment (a consulting company, maybe?) ,so maybe some support from a professional standpoint can help a lot (Julia Computing can be helpful in this case). if that doesn’t work, then use another language. Is all about economics, the real world works with money, and if you want to influence the development of Julia,or have first class help, you have to pour money to get what you want (this discourse is very active, but is not a replacement for enterprise support).
This discourse post will not gonna help modify the development of the language, nor get you what you want.

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My goal is to get you guys to invest in usability vs features.

I would suggest that you do zero work on any new features until you nail usability.

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When I buy Matlab, they don’t tell me that I need to buy professional support just to be able to use it. It just works.

That’s your competition. I’ve got a new startup, and we’re trying to decide whether to spend the money on Matlab or switch to a new paradigm. At the moment, Matlab is winning.

I wish I could endorse Julia instead.

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This is a post where are the priorities of the development team. debugging and tools are after reducing latency (a problem a lot of the userbase is having, for what i have noticed in those discourse forums). So the team is aware of the need for tooling, but is not the top priority right now (offtopic, normally the community is mentioned as one of the strengths of the Julia language, and finding the development priorities in a post is a clear example)

You are paying some thousands of dollars for that software, better be good :smile: , the same dollars could be invested in first class support from the Julia Team. but obviously depends of the use case. You want simulation of dynamical systems? Simulink is the industry standard right now. your workflow requires solving a lot of differential equations?, DifferencialEquations.jl moops the floor with ode15s.

One problem with MATLAB is deploying the software. MATLAB is excelent to prototype, but there is no way (as far as i know) to move the code to a production stage (if your product is software), or to generate pipelines compatible with computers without MATLAB (if your product is the data produced with your code)

If your Startup, after economic analysis, concludes that buying MATLAB licences is more cost-effective, that is totally fine, Julia has other strenghs that maybe you don’t need (or don’t see) right now, is not my job to sell you Julia nor to help you decide what you want to do with your business.

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Yeah, you’re right I pay $1,000 for matlab. But then I know I’m good to go. I have no idea what I’m going to get if I pay for support for Julia. It might work, it might not.

I’ve already spent 8 to 10 hours wtestling with the latest Julia distro, and my time is worth $100 an hour, so Matlab starts to look pretty enticing.

I don’t want to get into an argument with you guys - I really want to see Julia succeed. But It will never succeed in the broader software development landscape if it isn’t usable by a much broader spectrum of developers and companies than it is right now.

Julia is like an adolescent that’s ready to grow into adulthood. It has to choose whether to live on the beach and make paintings, or just get its accounting degree like its dad always said. One path is entertaining, but the other is relevant.

I’m offering up these comments in hopes that you guys will see that you’re at a place where you’re ready to grow and become something bigger and better than you have been. But it will require a new kind of commitment to move forward.

Of course, it’s your choice. I just really hope you choose to become relevant.

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Funny to mention that, Julia has 10 years, vs 35 years of MATLAB, so being considered is very good!, and for a language that just have one year of being out of beta, is doing pretty good.
Offtopic (or not so much) have you considered numpy?, python and numpy are older and have better developing tools, and you don’t have to pay a dime for using the language. a python module is a lot better than having to share matlab files and enviroments

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Why? Matlab is pretty damn good at what it does. Julia at least has the benefit of being a spectacular language (even if I fear most of what @Brad_Hines says is correct about the infancy and low-productivity of the environment). Python is further from math and less productive than Matlab.

All I can say, @Brad_Hines, is that many people here agree with you on where Julia needs to focus the next few versions, even if they aren’t the ones who would respond on discourse. It is on the right trajectory.

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Matlab is pain to work with by so many standards. The only thing it is polished. But the form itself is ugly.

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well, as always, it depends of the usecase, i agree with you totally,but if julia doesn’t exist and i had the need to implement some some numerical software, python+numpy would be one of my options (as a lot of the data science community right now)

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I agree completely. That is why I’m rooting so hard for Julia and investing in this conversation.

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As a side note, please don’t personalize Julia as a female. It is a programming language that just happens to have a female name.

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For reference to @carstenbauer note : The Julia Community Standards.

Then again to you points: I suggest you consider who you are actually talking to here. The Julia community is no Matlab, we don’t need to spread the language so our businesses report looks amazing. While most people would probably be happy about a wider adoption, much of the developer time, especially in the ecosystem, is unpaid – people coding in their free time because it’s fun for them or because they need a thing for themselves.

Luckily Julia is an open project and you can submit PRs to Github. I suspect that would be highly welcomed and more effective than a discussion about what other people should do in their free time.

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I also should note that Matlab doesn’t exclude Julia usage. I am surprised nobody mentioned MatlabCompat.jl[1][2] yet, also Octave is free and opensource, while Matlab-compatible. It is old (MatlabCompat.jl) project, but can be revived if required.

[1] https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1701/1701.02220.pdf

[2] https://github.com/MatlabCompat

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Indeed. Everyone involved has produced something that I find profound and compelling.

My passion arises only because I really really really want it to succeed.

I should have started off with how much respect I have for the team, prior to critiquing. My bad. You all have done something remarkable, that makes a software veteran with 40 years experience stand up and take notice.

I don’t usually burn time on online forums, but Julia is worth it.

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Well, I suppose that’s not completely honest either, I guess. At least some of my passion comes from having spent 8 hours fighting the debugger.

But I really want to Believe.

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Sure, I can understand that, especially if one is used to stuff “just working” because a good chunk of money was spent on it.

But consider this example: during the development of the most recent Julia version Juno got broken (at least for me). People are aware of it and trying to fix the issue – which I’m incredibly grateful for because I wouldn’t have a clue how to do this myself. So the appreciation that other people spend their free time to get my things working again (instead of working on fun new features) would definitively inform how I would approach these people.

At least some of my passion comes from having spent 8 hours fighting the debugger.

That sounds frustrating indeed. If you haven’t done so already, I’d suggest opening a topic on that issue – usually these problems can be fixed :slightly_smiling_face:

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