Hacker News Reader

Comment by ffriend | Hacker News Reader

> Until you need to do something very straightforward like web scraping or interacting with AWS

For web scrapping: https://github.com/porterjamesj/Gumbo.jl For AWS: https://github.com/JuliaParallel/AWS.jl

Definitely, Julia doesn't have as many libraries as Python, but most common needs are covered. And for the rest you can actually call Python through PyCall.jl

View on HN

This just proves my point, though. Gumbo is an HTML parser, not a scraper. The AWS library "will" support EC2 and S3. Again, this is all perfectly normal and it'd be absurd to expect such a young project to have a rich ecosystem. I think the Moore foundation grant is awesome and hope to use Julia someday. It's just that (1) as a scientist, you really just want to get shit done and (2) because it's marketed solely to scientists, I'm concerned Julia might never develop an ecosystem of general-purpose tools. R certainly hasn't.

Not sure what you mean by "web scrapper" than, but if you just need something to download web pages (in addition to parsing HTML), then Requests.jl covers it pretty well.

IIUC from GitHub page, AWS.jl has most API implemented, just not thoroughly tested. So it's not really mature or robust, but from my experience with packages at the same stage of development it should be pretty usable for a scientist who "just wants to get shit done".

I totally share your concern regarding marketing solely for scientists, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com