

Ask HN: Ask HN: Should I learn Julia? (good investment now?) - ljlf1

I have some additional limited free time, would it be a good idea to invest in learning Julia (bullish on the future of the language), or not?<p>Julia has ~everything that made Python popular for general programming and data science, plus much more, without the flaws.<p>Some of these benefits  include super low cost abstraction, beautiful syntax, multiple dispatch, coroutines, hygienic macros, almost c like speeds, dynamic type inference, high productivity  etc<p>Coming in the next release is multithreading, package precompilation, Interactive C++ FFI, array and matrix views, Generational GC and more. After that there are plans for standalone binary&#x2F;shared library creation and handling of distributed, streaming, and out of core data sets.<p>Facilities to call Python and R alleviate the package scarcity to an extent.  There are the bugs though, but they should be ironed out.<p>Why wouldn&#x27;t Julia  become wildly popular with all this stuff , and thus would it be a good idea to get ahead of the curve?  Or, is path dependence on go, python, r, node too strong?
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polybius
If you have a specific project in mind and think Julia would be a good fit, go
for it. That said I think it would be more valuable to you to build up a
reputation as someone who can analyze data in any language, than to brand
yourself as a Julia hand specifically. Sure 80% of the world might be
converted to Julia someday but it will mean nothing if your current project
involves translating a code base in Stata or SAS, or working with a bunch of
web devs who want to use Python for everything, or collaborating with a
research professor who just has to have his Matlab since that's what he used
for his thesis... Invest in becoming a data whisperer first and in becoming a
coder of specific languages second. Happy stats-ing!

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debacle
It's never a bad idea to learn a new language, but from experience I will say
that the quality of the language rarely has anything to do with how popular it
is.

