Since everybody is so hyped about Julia, I took on learning it and using it in one of my pet projects. The use case seemed to be perfect for Julia: financial portfolio optimization.
But honestly, it is a royal pain in the ass to use. Mostly because tooling is so crappy (no decent IDE).
For example, I've made these notes on my journey with Julia:
- Juno and VSCode julia is a pain
- Debugging is pain - no watch expressions (but debug> works)
- Works like with matlab (workspaces, designed for the single script use-cases)
- Long registry lookup times (2-5mins) when starting a new session
- No hints from IDE (Juno) on what methods are available for which types
- Ctrl-click navigation does not work to lookup definitations in libraries
- Debugger does not show the full list of elements - there are triple dots in the middle
- Filters and maps are not lazy
- Arrays start at one
- Precompilation times can take 1-2min
- Package management is done as a part of script execution
- Delay (0.5-1s) when processing commands (compilation?)
- Editors (Juno) do not check types at runtime when the information is readily available
- Include() includes (is this PHP all over again?) a file into the script!
- Reuses same REPL between different files
- DataFrames.jl: Transform does nonsense (use map instead)
- DataFrames.jl: No transpose
Obviously, there is a bunch of good things like freakin insane speed and vectorized method calls are awesome, but I struggle seeing myself becoming more producting than Python + Pandas.
It's really a shame that language is strongly and semi-statically typed yet no tooling is making a use of that.
But honestly, it is a royal pain in the ass to use. Mostly because tooling is so crappy (no decent IDE).
For example, I've made these notes on my journey with Julia:
- Juno and VSCode julia is a pain
- Debugging is pain - no watch expressions (but debug> works)
- Works like with matlab (workspaces, designed for the single script use-cases)
- Long registry lookup times (2-5mins) when starting a new session
- No hints from IDE (Juno) on what methods are available for which types
- Ctrl-click navigation does not work to lookup definitations in libraries
- Debugger does not show the full list of elements - there are triple dots in the middle
- Filters and maps are not lazy
- Arrays start at one
- Precompilation times can take 1-2min
- Package management is done as a part of script execution
- Delay (0.5-1s) when processing commands (compilation?)
- Editors (Juno) do not check types at runtime when the information is readily available
- Include() includes (is this PHP all over again?) a file into the script!
- Reuses same REPL between different files
- DataFrames.jl: Transform does nonsense (use map instead)
- DataFrames.jl: No transpose
Obviously, there is a bunch of good things like freakin insane speed and vectorized method calls are awesome, but I struggle seeing myself becoming more producting than Python + Pandas.
It's really a shame that language is strongly and semi-statically typed yet no tooling is making a use of that.