To add my two cents as a recent convert, when I started using Julia about a year ago I absolutely hated it.
My programming experience was only Matlab, and some odd C/C++ projects, and it was infuriating. There were mainly two reasons:
- Documentation: In Matlab, due to its age and popularity, you can type anything into google, add Matlab, and someone will have an answer/ built-in function. Where there was documentation, it remained far behind the Matlab way of providing a large number of examples for every given function. In addition, many things did not work as I expected, and I did not know where to look.
- Compile-time: I was working with existing code, specifically extending an existing struct, and because I did not know what I was doing, I made many small changes and had to restart the REPL each time (because structs can’t be redefined).
However, about 3 months in I was confident enough that I started my next project in Julia too, and it worked fantastically.
Looking back, many of the problems I had were because Matlab is not helpful in learning actual good Dev practices. I had to break many bad habits, and I have become a much better coder as a result.
As such, I don’t think a “simple” version, or one that guesses what you want would be helpful because it takes away the need to learn basic principles and just allows you to constantly “wing it”.
However, and I believe everyone agrees here, the documentation needs to improve significantly, but that can only be done with many hours by many people.