I am not sure if I should post my naive thoughts here but perhaps I represent quite a large user group: the ones with low to medium programming skills that want to deal with scientific problems without spending a lot of time programming (one of the goals of Julia I think ). I guess the long wish list is largely influenced by quite technically oriented people, since Julia is probably mostly embraced by people liking such challanges. Many of my collegues, currently using stuff like R and Matlab, want an easy-to-use language that is, for example, stable (not changing all the time) and has user-friendly tools. So, if the goal of the Julia language is to reach a broader audience, there perhaps must be a balance for the development between tools many people are used to (a Matlab like debugger, easy handling of missing data …) and more sophisitcated language featurs that helps developers to create advanced Julia code. In order for me to convience my collegues to start using Julia, I think a good debugger along with some other tools that makes Julia more user-friendly will help a lot. So I would not be disheartened by so many wanting a debugger. It would help to “sell” Julia to more people and raise the interest of the language. I guess what I wrote is known by everyone here, but I wanted to mention it so that it doesn´t get forgotten. I like the development strategy [posted here] (List of most desired features for Julia v1.x - #110 by StefanKarpinski) by StefanKarpinski.
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