Well said. Also, the article starts with a litany of praise from a variety of research groups. Some of these are big projects with government funding and serious computing requirements. Julia is deployed all over the place now.
I won’t comment on the relative numbers because there are top-notch developers in many language communities.
I think the more important point is that Julia has attracted enough first-rate people to self-sustainably build out an ecosystem — and even more keep joining. Several aspects of Julia’s design and core tooling interact to provide compounding leverage to this group. I think it’s a similar situation to the development of the NumPy ecosystem where standardizing on a common array data structure and API led to an explosion of interoperable libraries. Julia arguably takes that a step further by allowing any code to interoperate with high performance and fluent APIs. Julia’s performance characteristics also reduce the barrier to entry because people can make deep contributions throughout the ecosystem without needing to develop low-level programming expertise on top of their domain-specific knowledge.
I can think of at least 5 "core" contributors (out of only 20 or so) off the top of my head who have a PL or systems background. Given some time, I could easily find 10-15 more who are affiliated with the Julia Lab, Julia Computing or community regulars. Hell, most of the Julia Lab's projects are systems stuff.
Julia is a huge step forward in practical programming languages. I was super impressed when I saw it at Strange Loop last year, and they've made strides since then.
I won't pretend to understand all or this, but from what I can understand the Julia ecosystem is about to be light years ahead of anything else out there. It's an amazing community at the intersection of programming language theory and numerics/math. Exciting to see what's going to emerge.
The reason I ran away from Julia and don't plan on ever using it again, and don't recommend anyone use it outside of academia, is that so much of the community is made up of grad students. So you get a lot of research code and people who have never been professional programmers maintaining most of the ecosystem. Julia Computing is largely made up of people they've hired from the community straight out of grad school.
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