Most of my workmates are doing research on medicine, biology, pharmacy… applying statistics to their data but they know very little about programming or developing packages, they focus on their field and just need a good tool to do it.
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umm, I strongly object to the concept that anyone could package multiple imputation or meta-analysis, that’s like saying there’s no package that does philosophy or novel writing. what you want is to develop a Bayesian model, at which point the Julia interface to Stan will fit it.
In the past month I’ve had two folks come up to me in coffee shops asking if I was working on Julia and excitedly state that they’re really impressed with the language. Neither of them had really used it much yet, but they wanted to find ways to use it.
Speaking of which, if any of you are in Chicago and see me in an Andersonville/Edgewater coffee shop come say hi! I typically carry stickers around with me and am happy to hand them out. You can also just email/message me instead of playing Where’s Waldo.
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Where I work as a data scientist, most of my colleagues would still never even consider using Julia for work. However, I perceive a gradual shift in how discussions go from “Oh no, we’d never use something like that” to “That is obviously technically superior, but we would still never use it, besides, only a crazy person like Expanding Man would use something off github with fewer than 10^{10^{12}} stars, even though we use a lot of internal code that would have only about a dozen stars if it were on github”. (It is also ironic that some of the people that so emphasize the supposed importance of github stars were the first to emphasize to me the importance of automated unit testing and coverage reports.) I suspect the fact that I have used Julia so successfully for so long both personally and professionally has convinced some people around me that it must actually be pretty good after all.
So, I still perceive an extremely high level of resistance in data science world, but I sense that now that resistance is having to be rationalized, whereas two years ago the attitude was completely dismissive.
(This is all just my local view and generalizations of it are purely speculative.)
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I don’t usually find myself in that area, but would be into a Chicago-area meetup!
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For the past few days I have received a “502 bad gateway error” (using different internet connections) when following the invite link.
Is there something I could do about it? Is it useful for @xor0110 to know, or do I best make a topic in “Meta Discussion”?
I just created the channel, if you’re having issues connecting to Slack you should talk perhaps to @malmaud or someone else. Have you been already invited to the Slack server itself?
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No, as far as I understand I should request an invite here: https://slackinvite.julialang.org/ but I am unable to reach it.
I also can’t access the invite page
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Just jumping to steal the topic, I also want some stickers but not going to juliacon this year… Does anyone have a couple around the west coast (USA) that they are willing to mail to Davis, CA? 
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Sorry to add noise to the thread, but hey Argel, any Julia group, meetup, something in Davis? I recently moved to Sacramento and will happily make the drive for events there in the evenings. End noise.
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@sgjanssens @giordano the site really is down! It should be fixed this evening. Sorry about that.
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Sorry everyone, the Slack invite link (The Julia Language Slack) is back up.
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Hey Alejandro! None that I know of, but It would be nice!
Thank you very much for fixing this.
I joined “Slack” but then decided against it, as it is not my cup of tea, or coffee.
Meanwhile, I look forward to exploring the language proper, including this forum.
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Why was that? Steven is now one of the most frequent contributors.
Hi Malmaud, The invite link seems down 
Am I looking in the wrong thread?
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are you still in Chicago? looking for stickers and chat. Happy to buy coffee and cake.