Julia: a post-mortem

[StefanKarpinski]

When discussing relative language popularity, please, please, please don’t use TIOBE as a source of anything meaningful — it’s methodology is so deeply flawed it means hardly anything. Instead, use rankings with reasonable methodologies like IEEE and PYPL. According to PYPL, which was the most pessimistic about Julia’s ranking at the year’s start (TIOBE had Julia at #23 at the time), Go is 3.8x more popular than Julia. But Python is 23x more popular than Go. Yet nobody is wringing their hands over Go’s failure or lack of growth. Considering Go’s three year head start and massive corporate backing from Google, the actual question it seems like people ought to be asking is “how has Julia, without any large corporate sponsorship, been so wildly successful in such a short time?”