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by dochtman·5y ago·view on hn ↗
Your praise for Rust combined with the list of Julia problems left me curious what you find redeems Julia even though it has all these problems.
2 comments
Yeah, I guess only seeing one side of the argument can be a bit misleading...

It would probably take another 1,000 word blogpost to go through why Julia is amazing, despite all these problems. I'm sure I will make that post someday.

While I do like Rust, the basic design of Julia and Rust are just very different. They're intended to solve different problems, and the problems I have are the problems Julia is designed to solve. The love comes from just how well it solves those problems compared to every other programming language out there.

Compared to Rust specifically, Rust is a complete nonstarter for interactive coding, since there isn't a REPL. Even if there was, it's way too complicated to use interactively - a garbage collector would be a must, and a lot of these compile time checks that I praise would be a major pain in the ass when coding casually. It's also way too slow to write: Even after having written Rust for a few months, I estimate I can solve a problem using Julia 4 times faster than using Rust, using maybe 2/3 the number of lines, or less.

Rust is too low level for most data scientists, the borrow checker interrupts the flow of thought and it doesn’t work well in notebooks.