My background is programming and data science, and am just coming into Julia as of 0.6. I’ve covered a lot of languages since 1983, but my most recent gig has been in R for data science/predictive analytics.

That datasci company was just sold, so I have started exploring Julia as a platform for some larger projects that I want to work on. As a way to learn the language, I’m helping a friend parse some radio telescope FFT data for SETI. This problem quickly turns into a parallel map-reduce thing with almost a billion permutations.

So far Julia is exciting and new and shiny, but three things are frustrating - first, my ignorance of structure and libraries and usage patterns, second, the rapid changes, which is good, but makes for difficult search results, and third, some elements are just still more primitive than R. But I’ll take it and keep learning, and start to understand the difference between those three frustrations. I’m trying to gear up to contribute to the Project or Packages or both.