Agreed. However, many people won’t try again. They hear/read somewhere “Julia 1.0 is finally out”, go to the website, see a big “Download 1.0” button, try it out, and are disappointed in so many places (mostly but not exclusively the ecosystem). Maybe, they even make their way to discourse but then read a (probably correct) post like this one by Steven and are even more confused and annoyed.
Just the fact that IJulia doesn’t work on 1.0 on Windows yet, made many of my colleagues almost lough and say statements like (“This is supposed to be a 1.0 release?”). Of course, they don’t consider that most people develop these packages in their free time etcetera, but I guess that’s how the majority of “customers” are. Despite the fact being open-source, Julia competes with solid software like Matlab and Co and users won’t really care about “why” Julia 1.0 isn’t yet what it, for sure, will be.
Even me, an intensive user for about 2 years now, is a bit overwhelmed by Julia 1.0. Frankly, I sometimes feel like “it’s not quite there yet” in the sense of “hopefully they will release a 1.0.1 soon where they smoothen out things” (like the range(start, stop; kwargs...) or even more importantly the global scoping issue). So many changes have been made. Knowing the community for a bit, I believe most of them happend for a good reason , which one can find in a PR somewhere, but the number of changes was so huge that I couldn’t make up my own opinion in those PR’s at the time simply because I couldn’t keep up with the speed. For this reason, there seems to be a wave of (minor) complaints now (this relates to Stefan’s understandable, statement here) which can only be fixed in 1.x.x. In this regard, maybe it would have made sense (wildy speculating) to release the current 1.0 as “0.8” and kind of rename it to 1.0 once packages have been upgraded (0.7 had deprecations and also was only released for about two days). From a marketing perspective, 1.0 is a magical version number.
However, having said all that, I want to make clear that I love the language and the effort of everyone involved in creating it! Instead of just commenting here, I try (with all my energy) to convice my colleagues that Julia is and will be great. I think it’s really important for everyone who loves the language to contribute now (as fast as possible!). In particular the documentation has to be improved in many ways given the number of simple usage questions here. Make it easier for people to use the new package manager. I myself try to answer questions on stackoverflow as quickly as possible such that people get the feeling “ok, Julia has some issues but they helped me right away!”. Now is the time.
(Sorry for the lengthy post and for slightly derailing this thread.)