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Comment by Xcelerate | Hacker News Reader

Interesting to note that Julia comes in at #9 on the list, ahead of Scala, Clojure, and Erlang. I still think it's the most underrated programming language of the decade and hope that its usage continues to grow. I know it's touted as a language for numerical computing and scientific research, but I believe it would make a great general purpose language, perhaps even better than Python.

Other than a few minor nitpicks, Julia is genuinely a joy to program in, and the depth of its feature goes very far (multiple dispatch, homoiconicity, genuine macros, sophisticated type system, runtime compilation via LLVM, clean interfacing with C code). I can't say the same for other languages. You can tell the language was designed and not cobbled together in an ad hoc fashion.

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I'm not sure number of stars on gihub is a good measure of popularity of a language, especially when we're talking about number around 10k. I'm pretty sure Rust has more than 20K users, and Ruby and PHP have both more that 10K. Vast majority of these users though don't look through the C code of their engine and don't star it on github.

The default sort order is the number of "Stars" each repo has received, which isn't a useful measurement, IMO.

Does it still not have a decent charting library in the stdlib? I look at it every now and then (always looking for a good successor language for Python) and last I recall you had to use MatPlotLib? Is that accurate? This is stupidly simple in Matlab and should be here as well.

"Other than a few minor nitpicks"

That would be a nope. Gadfly doesn't meet my needs and seems to have stalled in development, so I use Matplotlib via PyPlot, but Matplotlib is a bit maddening to work with. I heavily considered attempting my own plotting library during grad school but couldn't find the time for it :/

(Although I will say that Convex.jl makes up for all the pain of not having a good plotting library...)

Thanks for the reply. I agree that Matplotlib is too complex. I'd abandon Python today if Julia had simple charting in stdlib, but practically nothing does outside .NET (sadly, I'm not a fan).

It's worth noting that convex.jl is developed by the same folks as cvx (matlab) and cvxpy (python). They all provide access to the same solvers with similar abstraction and usability.

A lot of people seem to like Plots.jl, a unified frontend for several plotting backends.

https://github.com/tbreloff/Plots.jl

I still prefer Gadfly, which does everything I need while looking great. (Only nitpick is slow time to first plot in each session.)

http://gadflyjl.org/stable/

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