Thanks for bringing this thread back alive—I am still learning (and struggling) a lot, but the slack channel really helps with random small questions that I need to ask on a daily basis. My feelings so far: I love the syntax and the community, and when Julia works I am very happy. But often I am frustrated by what I feel “non-programming” issues (which isn’t true, but I am used to MATLAB’s “works out of the box” paradigm), like something breaking, no knowing how to get something to work, developing packages, managing paths, etc. For example, right now I got my analysis script running and formatted nicely but I can’t get weave.jl to produce a report I need to submit (some issue with plotly backend plots not being generated).
I recently bought the book Hands-on Design Patterns and Best Practices with Julia by @tk3369 to get a feel for, as you said “modern software engineering and workflow”. It is not specifically for MATLAB users, and is not a beginner book, but from what I read from the preface seems to cover general principles that are applicable in all domains. I’ve only read it for a day, so can’t vouch for it yet but the general tone of the book is very gentle and encouraging.
I’d love to hear from @tk3369 about what he feels about people coming from propriety languages such as MATLAB and how we can make the journey to effectively using Julia as smooth as possible.