Why I still Recommend the Julia Programming Language

Does Yuri Vishnevsky have valid criticism of Julia?

I HAVE been asked to respond to criticism Yuri Vishnevsky raised in his article “Why I no longer recommend Julia”. As a big fan of Julia and author of Julia as a Second Language I feel a certain obligation to take the criticism of Julia serious.

I think Yuri makes lots of valid points, but I honestly think it is still far too early to draw conclusions. Julia is still a very young language with an immature ecosystem. That there are bugs in immature libraries and tools is nothing novel. I did iOS development when Swift was fairly new and constantly dealt with obscure problems. I encountered a large amount of crappy Objective-C libraries when making mobile apps.

Yet all that pales in comparison to all the JavaScript junk I have encountered, especially in relation to mobile development. Many people power through though because it is a toolset they like and want to work with.

Most Julia libraries are still immature and have very few contributors. It is not fair to compare with well established libraries on other platforms with large number of developers and numerous resources at their disposal. Apache Arrow is an excellent example. Julia gained feature completeness before the C++ reference platform with a large team of developers which had a head start and far more resources. Unless I remember wrong, Julia just had one guy doing the work.

If you got one guy beating a whole team, I think Julia should be cut some slack for having a bit more bugs in popular libraries. Julia simply doesn’t have the resources other languages have at the moment. And honestly, I am not sure if it is a valid claim. When you got libraries which can do a lot more, there will be more corner cases to cover. Julia tends to offer extremely flexible and versatile libraries.

Why does the PC platform have more problems than the Mac platform? Because there is far bigger variation in hardware. More configuration options. Same deal when comparing iOS and Android. When I was a mobile developer, I do remember how hard it was to test Android software because we had so may screen sizes and form factors to handle.

The question is what can you achieve as a developer and what do you have control over? I must say I have a much more positive experience than Yuri Vishnevsky, but I also probably use Julia in a very…