I really like the idea of Julia so much so that i imagine it competing with Python, edging past MATLAB and eclipsing R and Stata. This idea in me was planted by a few of the posts where the authors compared the packages available in repositories of some of these languages. It was when Julia’s websited showed Julia having nearly 8 thousand packages. Today the Juliahub UI packages lists more than 12000 packages. Its a tremendous growth in number of packages in Julia. I am not well versed in Julia but I have been in love with its ideas and ergonomics. This growth of packages make me want to jump the ship and make Julia my primary programming language. So, I will like to know the opinion of community on maturity and evolution of Julia package ecosystem. How does it compare with its niche competitors. Has it reduced the gap? How are other niche competitors affected by her heat? All in all I believe that if Julia edges even one of its competitor it will create a dedicated user group for it. Thats how python grew taking over smaller competitors one by one. Replacing one shell script, one program script a time.
Welcome! This is a very broad question and is hard to answer with a wide brush. As with any language, there are places where Julia (and its ecosystem) excels, and places where other tools may be better. There’s not going to be a single uniform answer. It’ll depend on what you want to do.
One answer I often give is that the amount of benefit you can get from Julia will depend upon how highly optimized and refined your alternatives are — and how well they fit your task at hand. If you (or some mega-corp) has poured millions of hours into some standard analysis/workflow/task in another language, Julia and its ecosystem probably won’t give you an advantage in a head-to-head comparison. But if you need to step outside that standard workflow (and its highly efficient compiled libraries) in any way, then Julia can allow that in very powerful ways. Modeling and simulation tends to be a great example here, because you need to write/define your own models in some way… and if they’re complicated, then the language you use can easily become a bottleneck.
Lastly, we ask that folks not use gendered pronouns when talking about the language here.