Some Insights from a Julia Developer
Sometimes, in my darker moments, I have the terrifying thought that one of the reasons that many users like R and made it popular (apart from the historical context of its now many libraries and being the main free version of statistical software), is specifically that it isn&#x27;t robust and sensibly designed from a programming&#x2F;analytical perspective.<p>You can download a package, type in a preset command on a preset thing, and 95% of the time (its R, so its only ever 95% of the time), you get back an answer&#x2F;number.<p>And if an answer is what you&#x27;re after, that&#x27;s where the considerations stop.<p>Was there an edge case?  Is R&#x27;s answer really correct?  Did it wallop something in your search path?  Do you have your profile set up differently to the author?  Do all the dependent packages clash and silently depend on how you load them and in what version you did so? Has R coerced something in the background, or pattern matched your typo&#x27;d variable to something it shouldn&#x27;t?  Somewhere in your code did you hit on one of the thousands of gotchas?<p>Who cares?  It gave me an answer.  I can give it to my boss or put it in a paper.<p>I personally am all for faster, safer, stricter (while still being dynamic) languages.  And i&#x27;ve tried to explain to many users that languages that produce errors when you do something you shouldn&#x27;t are not your enemies, they&#x27;re your friends.  But I see many people every day aren&#x27;t living that philosophy, they&#x27;d rather an answer than the right answer or a robust answer, despite what they&#x27;ll tell you in plain english.<p>With respect to Julia, someone like me might like it (well, if they got rid of the matlab syntax and just went back to the Lisp they copied and relabeled as &#x27;Julia&#x27; :P).<p>But perhaps many users don&#x27;t want a faster, more robust language.  Perhaps, many of them are comfortable with a simple but wrong answer.  And for that purpose, I can&#x27;t see where Julia wins out relative to R.<p>As I said though, these are thoughts i have in my darker moments...