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

6 points by ljlf1 ↗ HN
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?

Julia has ~everything that made Python popular for general programming and data science, plus much more, without the flaws.

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

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/shared library creation and handling of distributed, streaming, and out of core data sets.

Facilities to call Python and R alleviate the package scarcity to an extent. There are the bugs though, but they should be ironed out.

Why wouldn'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?

2 comments

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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!
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.