I think it would be useful to have in general, other than “Performances” a subsection “Interoperability” (or find a better word) with other languages.. PyCall, RCall, MAtlab, etc.. it’s quite a large subsample of topics to deserve its own category I believe…
Just to state the obvious, this is what the manual currently has:
Oh, maybe I misinterpreted OP, but I thought OP was talking about a category/subcategory in this Discourse forum.
There’s a legitimate discoverability issue with the current state of ad hoc tags naming other languages or interop packages. People asking about interop but aren’t committed to any particular interop package would be lumped together with ports or ecosystem comparisons. Counterpoints: 1) subtopics could justify a lot of categories or subcategories that bloats the set to the point people won’t bother looking through them, 2) if we just add the one subcategory, it exacerbates the misleading impression that performance and interop are particularly special topics for general-purpose Julia. The performance subcategory so far actually served to filter out the generic “this but faster please?” posts, and we could also argue interop is a Specific Domain. I do agree there’s a middle ground somewhere, but we need holistic and restrained standards for subcategories, especially a category as big as General Usage.
Indeed, I think that “Specific Domains” is already too bloated.
While some subcategories are clearly domain specific (“Astro/Space”, “Machine Learning”…) intended for, well, domain specific, user groups of Julia, some other categories (“Visualization”, “GPU”, the would-be “Interoperability”) are instead domain agnostic and discuss various supporting features of the language without being attached to any given final usage… my opinion is that these would better fit under “General”…
But yes, of course the distinction in some cases remains blur…
Yeah, I don’t want to divide up our categories too finely here, and it doesn’t make sense to only add interoperability alongside General Usage > Performance. The more categories we add, the harder it is for someone new to just post in General Usage because it feels like they need to find the “right” subcategory.
That said, I do see the point about relocating some of the Specific Domains subsections into General Usage.
The biggest advantage to categories is that you can easily opt-in to following/emails/notifications/etc, and it’s easy to just bookmark your interest directly. I’m not sure that applies to folks needing interoperability — they generally just care about one interop language.