I have been following Julia development for a while now (about a year and a half). It seems like it will be a great tool, but it is still VERY immature. The amount of breakage, especially with regards to important packages like plotting, has become something of an "in" joke. I'm really looking forward to seeing them get their package management situation worked out and a set of core packages nice and stable.
> I'm really looking forward to seeing them get their package management situation worked out and a set of core packages nice and stable.
I really don't understand why each language ecosystem has to go through this phase. What would be so bad about implementing packaging the way it has been done in OSGi for a decade? It's language agnostic, since the bundle can export/import namespaces or arbitrary capabilities, it has solved the dependencies-are-a-graph-not-a-list problem, it supports versioning and multiple parallel versions of the same package.
Believe me, I'd much rather use a standard packaging system for all languages. I'm not a Julia developer, so I don't have control over what they're doing. But ultimately, I need to be able to install packages in order to use the language to solve problems, so whether they reinvent the wheel (in your view, I'm not as familiar with it as you seem to be) or roll their own, it still just needs to get done.
I concur. I can't really use it for any important projects right now, so I'm just following along and playing with it for simple and small scripts where breakage and failure are not a problem :)
