
Julia 0.6 is out - ceyhunkazel
https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/release-0.6/NEWS.md
======
abakus
Julia is becoming too complicated for an average data scientist like me to
master. It is not that much easier than C++ (which I know some). Considering
it wants to attract people with Matlab background... I think it kind of
defeats the purpose.

~~~
oconnore
Being complicated and needing to care about the complications are different.
For example, I use Julia as a fast, pseudo-Matlab desk calculator and haven't
bothered to read about the type system [1] (I think I read a "so you're coming
from Matlab" style cheat sheet). Maybe someday, but until then it sorta just
works as you would expect.

[1]: The other day I did spend some time figuring out how to do
Pkg.add("SQLite").

~~~
rdtsc
> Being complicated and needing to care about the complications are different.

I used to think that but changed my mind when it comes to programming
languages. Mainly because once complexity is there, unless it's just a single
developer or very tightly controlled / peer reviewed development practice,
different contributors will use various subsets of features of the language
and so you still have to know all the complex edge cases because you might
have to read code. And arguably code is read more than written.

~~~
oconnore
Maybe I'll run into that, but like I just went digging into some packages to
see if I could get myself lost, and instead I learned that Julia can work on
raw pointers, and found a cool raytracer that seems pretty readable in the CSG
package:

[https://github.com/JuliaDB/PostgreSQL.jl/blob/master/src/dbi...](https://github.com/JuliaDB/PostgreSQL.jl/blob/master/src/dbi_impl.jl#L160)
[https://github.com/jtramm/ConstructiveSolidGeometry.jl/blob/...](https://github.com/jtramm/ConstructiveSolidGeometry.jl/blob/master/src/ConstructiveSolidGeometry.jl#L317)

------
baldfat
The list of BREAKING CHANGES still keeps me away from doing more in Julia
right now.

[https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/release-0.6/NEWS.md#...](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/release-0.6/NEWS.md#breaking-
changes)

~~~
digitalzombie
Yep, they stated version 1.0 will be the one where they stabilized.

Likewise Rust is like this for the language. Their standard library iirc were
still developing?

So it suck in term of wanting something stable but at the same time they need
people using their language.

I think the upside is there are tons of stuff you can contributes including
the small stuff.

~~~
rspeer
No, Rust went 1.0 a while ago. They will not make breaking changes to the
language until a hypothetical 2.0 release, which at the moment they are not
considering.

Of course the standard library changes; it's not a dead language.

New features, including new functions in the standard library, are marked
'unstable' when they are introduced. Unstable features have to be explicitly
requested, indicating that the programmer is aware that their functionality
may change before they're stabilized.

~~~
steveklabnik
There is an important point here, which is that even if you've been stable for
a while (two years for Rust) and even if you try to get that message out (some
people on HN think there are too many posts about Rust), it can take a _very_
long time for broad perception to catch up with reality.

That's not a value judgement on those who didn't know; cache invalidation is a
hard problem. But it's an interesting facet of languages that plays out in a
number of ways. See the link to Dan Luu's post from forever ago, posted
numerous times in this thread as another example.

------
sbuccini
Julia Computing announced its seed round yesterday[1], hoping we can see some
additional velocity here.

[1][https://juliacomputing.com/press/2017/06/19/funding.html](https://juliacomputing.com/press/2017/06/19/funding.html)

~~~
plinkplonk
The investing VC's thoughts - "Deconstructing the Near Perfect Deal"

[https://hackernoon.com/deconstructing-the-near-perfect-
deal-...](https://hackernoon.com/deconstructing-the-near-perfect-deal-our-
investment-in-julia-computing-dca81bb1d779)

------
nnm
Does anyone know when Julia 1.0 will be out?

~~~
ellisv
I believe 0.6 was the last 0.x release before 1.0 but that may have changed.
At this time, the 1.0 milestone hasn't been assigned a due date [0].

[0]
[https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/milestone/4](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/milestone/4)

~~~
kprybol
That's actually a bit out of date. The nightly builds are now 0.7 (not sure
I've seen this mentioned beyond Discourse/Github). It will primarily serve as
a depreciation release, i.e. things that would have just broke when going from
0.6 -> 1.0 will instead throw a depreciation warning.

~~~
StefanKarpinski
1.0 and 0.7 will come out at the same time. The recommended upgrade path will
be to run the application and tests under 0.7 and fix any deprecation
warnings, then switch to 1.0 where those warnings will become errors and fix
any you missed. Should be pretty straightforward and allows us to release 1.0
without any deprecations.

------
bitmadness
This feels appropriate:

[https://danluu.com/julialang/](https://danluu.com/julialang/)

tl;dr: Julia is a great idea, but with poor testing and quality control.
Community is (apparently) a bunch of dicks.

Just to be clear, I don't personally have much experience with it, I'm just
summarizing Dan's review.

~~~
ihnorton
> testing and quality control

There have been major improvements in the past three years and code coverage
is now consistently above 80%.

> Community is (apparently) a bunch of ...

I'm admittedly biased, but based on a number of years of experience and
personal efforts, I think this is not a fair characterization. I don't know
what happened in that private forum -- but I do know that the Julia community
is _thousands of people_ , with a huge, public archive of helpful, respectful
interactions among newbies, non-Julia experts, core devs, and everyone in
between.

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/julia-
users](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/julia-users)

(Disclosure: Julia committer)

~~~
ellisv
Just want to point out that the community forums moved from Google groups to
Discourse awhile ago.

[https://discourse.julialang.org](https://discourse.julialang.org)

------
goldenkey
[https://danluu.com/julialang/](https://danluu.com/julialang/) brings up some
good points

Have they been addressed by now?

~~~
ViralBShah
See the thread above. Short answer: yes.

