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Comment by Gravityloss | Hacker News Reader

I hope they can have it accessible to people who are not that interested in fancy computer science concepts, but rather want to read in data, do computations, and write out data/graphs again. Without massive boilerplate or hair pulling.

It seems to be really hard to create smooth user experiences for the common use cases of such complex products. I think people have been trying to oust Matlab for 31 years or so.

Disclaimer: I haven't checked Julia for a few years. Requiring hand reloading of files after editing and no native graph support were a few major problems for a workflow back then.

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The scientific community is not going to adopt any new language until most used idioms can be easily found in a quick search and copy-pasted. It is extremely difficult to arrive there.

I totally agree that having dynamic dispatch in the first position of the features list, for example, does not help. But, in my opinion, it is ok for a pre-1.0 language. That is what makes exciting seeing some external help to release a stable version.

What's wrong with dynamic dispatch?

Nothing at all. But, if Julia takes off, I would not expect it to be the main selling point.

It can be a very interesting feature for somebody into language design, but the average Joe working in a lab is not going to learn a completely new language and rewrite all his Matlab code because of it. Most probably, he has not idea what it is or why he would want it.

It was an example of how, at this point, it seems like the web site is more directed towards language developers than potential users.

Actually, I think the main page is directed toward those scientific users who create their own custom projects and/or libraries. This also goes back to your earlier point in that early in a language evolution you need more library and package creators so you can have a broad ecosystem for the more day to day programmers. One example of this need, is the creator of the fftw library (a cornerstone fft implementation in C) wrote several popular packages for Julia. I think there's a talk he gave at the 2014 JuliaCon.

In this regard, multiple dispatch is actually a huge selling point! I've written in Fortran 90 code, C, Python, and enjoyed most of those languages. There is something unique about being able to pull up the source code for almost every operator/function in the language, implemented in that language. Fortran has this, but is much more statically oriented and difficult for quick scripting. Python, well I'm hopeful pypy keeps building momentum. Or perhaps Pyrhon ported to web assembly, in more pure Python.

The hand reloading of files doesn't seem to have changed. I still have to reload my modules after every edit. I'd love someone to show me a better way if it exists.

https://github.com/malmaud/Autoreload.jl

Could this be part of the language? How do actual users get around this issue?

>trying to oust Matlab for 31 years or so.

Apparently Python is having some success there http://blog.mikiobraun.de/2013/11/how-python-became-the-lang...

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