# the \`range\` improvement for 1.1

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/the-range-improvement-for-1-1/18378>\
**Category:** Internals & Design\
**Created:** [December 6, 2018, 1:57pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/the-range-improvement-for-1-1/18378 "2018-12-06T13:57:29Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 11

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**Author:** ![carstenbauer](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/carstenbauer/32/4981_2.png) [@carstenbauer](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/carstenbauer)\
**Post date:** [December 7, 2018, 9:46am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/the-range-improvement-for-1-1/18378/11 "2018-12-07T09:46:58Z")

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> There is a tension between usability/concision and consistency/purity (think matlab vs scheme); I feel that the balance has shifted towards the latter in several decisions, as Julia distances itself from being a language for technical computing.

I think (and hope) this shift is also largely due to the non-breaking constraint of the 1.0 era. In my view, the mindset was to better make things clean and precise for 1.0, even at the expense of verbosity. There were a lot of “we can decide/add that later” statements since adding convenience functionality typically isn’t breaking. Therefore I have hope that we’ll get (back) convenience methods in the future.

> `dropdims(sum(a,dims=1),dims=1)`

Yeah, I also have a bunch of those overly verbose expressions (`dims` occurs three times!) in my code as well now.

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