I love Julia-the-language, but the ecosystem is... weird. I'm not at all a fan of how some packages try to install non-Julia stuff for you behind the scenes by default as mentioned in TFA. It's a surprising default and it makes a mess of your system that is hard to clean up.
GNU R and Common Lisp (especially Quicklisp) already made these design mistakes, and let's please not repeat them. The initial of friendliness "do everything interactively right in the REPL" quickly gives way to "arggghhh".
Edit: on second thought, I guess there is a fine line to be drawn here. We are already accustomed to R, Python, Node, Ruby, etc. building C stuff at package installation time. I don't have a great sense of where to draw the line, but somehow I feel the Julia convention crosses it.
GNU R and Common Lisp (especially Quicklisp) already made these design mistakes, and let's please not repeat them. The initial of friendliness "do everything interactively right in the REPL" quickly gives way to "arggghhh".
Edit: on second thought, I guess there is a fine line to be drawn here. We are already accustomed to R, Python, Node, Ruby, etc. building C stuff at package installation time. I don't have a great sense of where to draw the line, but somehow I feel the Julia convention crosses it.