Comment by yellowapple
8 hours ago
What's stopping Julia from being reasonably usable to make actual applications? It's been awhile since I've touched it, but I ain't seeing a whole lot in the way of obstacles there — just less inertia.
8 hours ago
What's stopping Julia from being reasonably usable to make actual applications? It's been awhile since I've touched it, but I ain't seeing a whole lot in the way of obstacles there — just less inertia.
Presumably inertia and ecosystem size (but that's a follow on of inertia). When Julia came out Python already had traction for ~most things.
Keep in mind that it went with 1 based indexes to make the switch easy for Matlab types. I'm not sure if that was a good or bad move for the long term. I'm sure it got some people to move who otherwise wouldn't have but conversely there are also people like me who rejected it outright as a result (after suffering at the hands of 1 based indexing in Matlab I will never touch those again if I have any say in the matter).
I've considered switching to it a few times since seeing that they added variable indexes but Python works well enough. Honestly if I were going to the trouble of switching I'd much rather use Common Lisp or R5RS. The nearest miss for me is probably Chicken, where you can seamlessly inline C code but (fatally) not C++ templates.
If I ever encounter "Chicken, except Rust" I will probably switch to that for most things.
It's actually better suited IMO, being a compiled language. I'm not sure how anyone could consider the current train wreck of getting python code just to run "actual applications." uv is great and all, but many of these "actual applications" don't use it.