I also think include is not a great way to organize code and one of Julia’s weak spots. I compared it to Go in another thread:
In Go, you can’t include files: you can import packages and one package = one directory and each file has an explicit list of imported packages at the top, and importing names in the main namespace (like
usingin Julia) is strongly discouraged. In Julia, files can include files can include files… Open a file, you don’t know in which context it is included so you can’t be sure how it’s going to be interpreted. Maybe it’s even included several times in different contexts? Maybe the behavior depends on the order of includes?Another way to put it: declarative (rather than imperative) code is generally considered more robust or at least easier to analyze and verify. In Go, you write imperative code in functions, but the overall organization (definition of packages and functions) is declarative. In Julia, this organization itself is imperative.
Note that Jeff voiced some agreement 