You touch upon some interesting pain points. I really like Julia and working with it is a pleasure.
Except the Module system, which feels unnecessarily arcane. I'm happy to be educated on why, but it seems to successfully combine the awkwardness of C-style #include with the mess of a free-form module system. The end result is a Frankenstein monster where technically everything is possible, everything could be included anywhere, there are no boundaries or even conventions. It makes for a frustrating experience for a newbie.
Say you have a package, and inside is a file called `xyz.jl`. You open the file and it defines a module called Xyz. But this tells you absolutely nothing about where in the package Xyz will appear. It could be included somewhere deep in the hierarchy, or it could be a submodule. It could be included multiple times in multiple places! That's bad design for sure, but the language places no boundaries on you. You open another file `abc.jl`, and see no modules at all, just a bunch of functions, which in turn call other functions that are defined God knows where. A julia file does not have to contain any information about where the symbols it's using come from, since it will be just pasted in verbatim to some location somewhere.
The whole module system feels like one big spaghetti of spooky action at a distance.
It's a shame too, because the rest of the language is very neat. Once one gets over the hurdle of the modules, it is possible to establish conventions to bring some sanity in there, but it's a hurdle that many people will probably not want to deal with.
Except the Module system, which feels unnecessarily arcane. I'm happy to be educated on why, but it seems to successfully combine the awkwardness of C-style #include with the mess of a free-form module system. The end result is a Frankenstein monster where technically everything is possible, everything could be included anywhere, there are no boundaries or even conventions. It makes for a frustrating experience for a newbie.
Say you have a package, and inside is a file called `xyz.jl`. You open the file and it defines a module called Xyz. But this tells you absolutely nothing about where in the package Xyz will appear. It could be included somewhere deep in the hierarchy, or it could be a submodule. It could be included multiple times in multiple places! That's bad design for sure, but the language places no boundaries on you. You open another file `abc.jl`, and see no modules at all, just a bunch of functions, which in turn call other functions that are defined God knows where. A julia file does not have to contain any information about where the symbols it's using come from, since it will be just pasted in verbatim to some location somewhere.
The whole module system feels like one big spaghetti of spooky action at a distance.
It's a shame too, because the rest of the language is very neat. Once one gets over the hurdle of the modules, it is possible to establish conventions to bring some sanity in there, but it's a hurdle that many people will probably not want to deal with.