According to the latest Stack Overflow survey, people who use Julia really like Julia, but few people want to use it. So, while many are working on highly requested language features, improving the tools and enriching the ecosystem, I hope the Julia community doesn’t forget to improve communication and promotion.
Some ideas for improving communication/promotion could be:
Julia community members submit Github repositories, blog posts, and JuliaCon videos to Slashdot, Hacker News, or any similar website. For example, @xgdgsc submitted the Cthulhu.jl repo a few hours ago and it got some interesting participation.
The Julia Lang website better reflects the adoption of Julia in academia and industry with case studies, blog posts, and/or logos of companies and institutions that use Julia like the website of Flux does.
Developers of Julia and major Github organizations write blog posts about upcoming major features from time to time like the Rust community does.
Note: I have already shared these concerns in the mega-thread.
Update: I have edited the title and content of the post to adopt a more neutral tone. English is not my native language and sometimes I can’t get an idea across in the tone that this forum requires.
I personally appreciate your inputs and nudges, which have triggered very fruitful discussions. However, perhaps a less “bossy” tone would be more pleasant for the community? Sentences like
The Julia community should improve…
I would like to see that…
feel like a list of demands, and it may not go over well for people who volunteer their time and energy with no financial reward.
Also given you’ve made the HN point qutie a few times now I feel I should point out that anyone can submit stuff to HN, you don’t have to be the author (and I’d say most of the time it’s not the author submitting their own work but someone else saying “hey I found this interesting thing”).
Submitting a Githut repository or blog post should be the authors’ decision, as it may attract “unwanted” attention. Hacker News sometimes doesn’t moderate comments well enough, so some websites have blocked their traffic.
I have had a positive experience with Julia and duckdb, specifically using multithreaded tasks for reads/writes. Similar to their example in python, but the language level support which Julia has for tasks/coroutines is not present in other languages. However, the documentation for Julia for duckdb is less than other languages. I think adding documentation to tools which span languages might be a productive area to post , and it would highlight other packages (like imd or data frame) which would naturally link into them. I would envision it more as documentation example of how to do something, rather than a benchmark comparing to other languages.
I disagree. I am more impressed by a user, or perhaps multiple, showing their really cool solutions to their problems using this neat package than the package author explaining the fundamental features. That’s not to say the latter is unimportant, it is important for communication. But the former is the promotion you’re also looking for. I would also argue that user discussion diverts “unwanted” attention from the author; people don’t expect users to fix or improve the package, just demonstrate how it can be applied as is. On the other hand, it’s very easy to make demands of a developer (as this post is doing), so they should actually be careful about making the time to get involved in discussions.
Half of it appears to be complaints that 1) broader static analysis is fundamentally worse in Julia than statically typed languages because of dynamic typing, runtime-enforced interfaces, and interactivity, and 2) compilation latency and the learning curve to handle it and other performance pitfalls is still getting in the way of people switching from other dynamic languages. These are all valid downsides to the language. Code demos are better than AMAs at promoting the strengths.