I miss Julia's motto

Offtopic
1

I miss “A fresh approach to technical computing” at the start of a REPL session, absent in 1.0 and present in < 1.
in 0.7:

               _
   _       _ _(_)_     |  A fresh approach to technical computing
  (_)     | (_) (_)    |  Documentation: https://docs.julialang.org
   _ _   _| |_  __ _   |  Type "?" for help, "]?" for Pkg help.
  | | | | | | |/ _` |  |
  | | |_| | | | (_| |  |  Version 0.7.0 (2018-08-08 06:46 UTC)
 _/ |\__'_|_|_|\__'_|  |  Official http://julialang.org/ release
|__/                   |  x86_64-apple-darwin14.5.0

in 1.0:

               _
   _       _ _(_)_     |  Documentation: https://docs.julialang.org
  (_)     | (_) (_)    |
   _ _   _| |_  __ _   |  Type "?" for help, "]?" for Pkg help.
  | | | | | | |/ _` |  |
  | | |_| | | | (_| |  |  Version 1.0.0 (2018-08-08)
 _/ |\__'_|_|_|\__'_|  |  Official https://julialang.org/ release
|__/                   |
13 Likes
2

It turned out that Julia is a general purpose programming language.

18 Likes
3

Me too. A lot.

The banner looks as if someone had plucked out lines right now. Even worse if you compile yourself and the ‘Official…’ line is not printed and the whole right side goes ‘through the roof’.

Can understand that for ‘the core’ after almost a decade it is not so fresh anymore. But for ‘the world’ at large I think it is still fresh. At least this is my impression from e.g. hacker news yesterday. Or if you compare with R (S), C or Fortran.

3 Likes
4

Isn’t it undisputed that Julia also works well as a general purpose programming language?

But the focus in my impression was (and still is) technical/scientific/numeric computing.

In Jeff’s Master: “Many of the ideas explored here are not exclusively applicable to technical computing, but we have chosen to target that application area for several reasons…”. Or in the “A fresh approach to numerical computing” paper: “Julia began with a deep understanding of the needs of the scientific programmer and the needs of the computer in mind…” and “It [Julia] is also recognized as being better suited to general purpose computing tasks than traditional numerical computing systems…”.

For R in wikipedia it is written: “R is a programming language and free software environment for statistical computing and graphics…”. The designated statistical ‘niche’ certainly didn’t hinder R to become generally used, as in shiny and so.

5 Likes
5

Saying “A fresh approach to technical computing” in front of Julia makes users feel that there are actual people behinds this, and imprinting the image of Julia as a product of passion and enthusiasm. But without this, Julia is just another tool they use.

I’m a little bit exaggerating here :slight_smile: to make a point that any software is better if users can feel the warmth of a human being. And showing such a motto is a good way to do this.

7 Likes
6

Yes, while we really like “A fresh approach to…”, it was too restricted to technical computing. The banner was also getting too busy. Thus, for now, we removed all extra text.

The “Official Julialang release” banner is only put in for binaries that are uploaded to Julialang.org.

1 Like
7

I hope to see Julia take off for general purpose programming and I think a messaging shift would make a non trivial contribution towards that end.