<story><title>What&apos;s Great about Julia?</title><url>https://viralinstruction.com/posts/goodjulia/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>CoreyFieldens</author><text>Everytime Julia is mentioned on HN, I see a surprising amount of people who dislike the language for whatever reason. I understand a lot of their concerns (time to first plot, debugging sucks, IDE support isn&amp;#x27;t amazing yet). However, I don&amp;#x27;t see a lot of alternatives for the niche that Julia occupies. If you want to do high performance scientific computing, there aren&amp;#x27;t a lot of options in terms of languages.&lt;p&gt;Python is the de facto but it&amp;#x27;s so slow for anything that can&amp;#x27;t be well represented as vectorized NumPy operations. There are ways around that like Numba, Jax, Cython, etc. but their use cases are pretty limited, and they don&amp;#x27;t work well with other Python packages.&lt;p&gt;There is, of course, C and C++ which are commonly used to speed up Python or as standalone packages. However, C++ is such a complicated beast that writing performant and correct code takes forever. C is much more manageable, but I find that there are not a lot of scientific packages written in pure C. This isn&amp;#x27;t even touching on the horrendous build system that is CMake.&lt;p&gt;Fortran is a pretty simple looking language and would probably be the closest to Julia in terms of speed and expressiveness, but the writing is on the wall and Fortran&amp;#x27;s days are numbered. I am not aware of many new packages being developed using it.&lt;p&gt;Other than that, there&amp;#x27;s languages like Rust and Go but those have ecosystems that are so small, they make Julia&amp;#x27;s ecosystem look like Python&amp;#x27;s. I really don&amp;#x27;t want to spend my time as a grad student writing basic numerical libraries from scratch.</text></comment>
<story><title>What&apos;s Great about Julia?</title><url>https://viralinstruction.com/posts/goodjulia/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>canjobear</author><text>As someone who has used and contributed to Julia, I find Yuri Vishnevsky&amp;#x27;s arguments about correctness totally fatal [0]. And Yuri&amp;#x27;s examples are not obscure, they are totally realistic scenarios where Julia silently returns wrong results in ways that may be hard to detect. I do mostly scientific computing, and the idea that I might have to retract a paper because of a bug &lt;i&gt;in the programming language&lt;/i&gt; is intolerable. It doesn&amp;#x27;t matter how beautiful and fun to write and develop the language is if it can&amp;#x27;t be trusted to return correct results.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;yuri.is&amp;#x2F;not-julia&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;yuri.is&amp;#x2F;not-julia&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>