We have now migrated to a new website in preparation for 0.7 and 1.0. It is still work in progress, and all suggestions and improvements are welcome. The new website, apart from trying to look nicer, also tries to focus on other parts of the user experience (Packages, IDEs, community) in addition to the language and its development.
The old website is still live at http://www_old.julialang.org/
One thing that’s come up a lot in forums that I don’t see addressed here is an effort to provide new users with a roadmap to the ecosystem. Julia’s clearly taken a “let 100 flowers bloom” approach to packages, which has led to a lot of great innovation. But for a new user it can be really overwhelming.
Any possibility of a resource that’s more curated than the “See all packages” link and more organized and comprehensive then the few blurbs on the front page?
The Ecosystem section is meant to serve as a gentle guide to draw ones attention to the actively maintained and/or widely used packages. I don’t think we want to be prescriptive though, and want to continue encouraging new things.
What should we do in addition to make it easier for new users?
The website says “The Julia community has contributed over 2,000 packages”, but when you look at the link provided, there is closer to 1900.
Under scientific domains it says “With a set of highly enthused set of developers and maintainers from various parts of the scientific community, this ecosystem will only continue to get bigger and bigger.” I think that the second “set of” is a typo.
Plots.jl is not actually explicitly linked in visualizations, which I think would be good.
It seems like a lot of the best (most well maintained and used) packages have come to live in Julia[TOPIC] github groups, which do a pretty good job of advertising their sub-packages. Communicating that organizational structure more explicitly I think might be useful, and perhaps a separate page that gave quick overviews of those families seems like it would be really useful. Packages from within some are covered, but none are covered by name, and only a few by family-level links. I’m thinking particular of: JuliaIO, JuliaStats, JuliaML, JuliaGraphs, JuliaData, and JuliaOpt. Links to really interesting packages not in a “family” is fine too, but I think that’s a great way to give people an easy landing place / first place to go when they need a package to do X.
Also: a way to sort the package index website would be super helpful. It’s very impressive, but I’m pretty sure it’s completely unusable for finding appropriate packages, since the descriptions below packages are so short and it’s so full of what seem like old-dead packages. The ability to sort by popularity to help a new user figure out the “most used” packages (and thus good starting points that are likely to be well supported) would be very useful, as would filtering out packages that haven’t been updated in more than a year, that fail tests, that have zero starts, etc.
However I do not have a good enough comprehension of English to decide if there should be a that or a which in this sentence: Julia is a highly productive language that runs fast
I find the font “Futura LT Medium” a little bit hard to read. For e.g. the “i” is very close to the previous letter if you have a look at “dispatch” or “multiple”. But maybe that’s only me…
