Talk:Julia (programming language): Difference between revisions

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:Hey just a note that I decided to go with the change after no input over a week. I also removed some parts that either did not have good sources or I felt did not fit "large companies/governments adopting Julia for their work." Also to note: while I was restructuring, I noticed that many of the sources in this section may not be the most reliable? I kept them in for now but it might be best if the source for some of these claims is not a Julia package's Github README, for example. Especially when there could be better sources to back the information. That's all I wanted to say hope you have a wonderful weekend if you're reading this :) [[User:Moon motif|Moon motif]] ([[User talk:Moon motif|talk]]) 10:24, 30 October 2022 (UTC)
 
== Excessive detail/difficult readability ==
 
In my opinion, while the facts in this article are all fairly well-sourced, the article contains way too many esoteric details that are of little use to most people. These details are often in parentheses, sometimes nested parentheses, with "e.g." and "i.e.," and that in turn makes it hard to even follow the original text. This type of writing style is unlike most other articles I have encountered on this site. Take this paragraph in the introduction:
 
* "Several development tools support coding in Julia, such as [[Integrated development environment|integrated development environments]] (e.g. for Microsoft's [[Visual Studio Code]], an [[Plug-in (computing)|extension]] is available providing debugging and [[Lint (software)|linting]] support); with integrated tools, e.g. a [[Profiling (computer programming)|profiler]] (and flame graph support available for the built-in one), debugger, and the Rebugger.jl package "supports [[Interactive programming|repeated-execution debugging]]" and more."
 
All that this paragraph really needs to say is that there is linting and debugging support in IDEs for the language. Mentions of VS Code, the flame graph, and whatever Rebugger.jl is doing are details which should be in a section further down or omitted altogether save their citations. I am of the opinion that the entire paragraph should be removed from the intro because it does not concern the language itself, but rather third-party tools.
 
As far as I understand, Julia's support for compilation to binary executables is still experimental, and not really a core feature of the language - does it really deserve a paragraph in the intro?
 
As another example, take the list in the history section with the version numbers 1.1, 1.2, etc. Given that the 1.X is a stable version of the language, this seems like a list that could be cleaned up by simply mentioning the most important features that have been added since the 1.0 release, such as the multithreading from 1.3. Those sentences about 1.7+ being time-based releases or 1.7.3 shouldn't be there at all - aren't all patch releases "fixing some issues?" And who cares about time-based vs. feature-based? There are also multiple sentences in this section mentioning the details regarding performance improvements or things done to reduce compiler latency when it could really be boiled down to one or two sentences about how the developers have been focusing on the problem more generally.
 
Here's a draft of how I would write the history section, starting after the Bezanson quote and up to the sponsors subsection:
 
 
Julia 1.0 was released on 8 August 2018 with the syntax stabilized. Since then, the language has added many new features, such as composable multithreading in version 1.3, syntax for generic array indexing in 1.4, and an improved random number generator in 1.7. The releases have also gradually improved compiler latency and package loading times, i.e. the "time-to-first-plot" performance.
 
Three of the Julia co-creators are the recipients of the 2019 [[J. H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software|James H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software]] "for the creation of Julia, an innovative environment for the creation of high-performance tools that enable the analysis and solution of computational science problems." Alan Edelman received the 2019 IEEE Computer Society [[Sidney Fernbach Award]] "for outstanding breakthroughs in high-performance computing, linear algebra, and computational science and for contributions to the Julia programming language."
 
Since 2014, the Julia community has hosted an annual conference (JuliaCon) focused on developers and users. The conferences have taken place across a number of locations including MIT and the University of Maryland, Baltimore. JuliaCon was conducted virtually from 2020 to 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The event audience has grown from a few dozen people to over 43,000 unique attendees during JuliaCon 2021. The conferences have featured keynote addresses from notable individuals such as [[William Kahan]] (the primary architect of the [[IEEE 754-1985|IEEE 754]] floating-point standard) and Soumith Chintala (co-creator of [[PyTorch]]).
 
 
It's much shorter, but it's also more readable and obviates the need for the reader to wade through the details of changes made to the language which could be easily accessed in their release notes. This would of course be a major edit, so let me know your thoughts. [[User:Eulalie880|Eulalie880]] ([[User talk:Eulalie880|talk]]) 21:36, 12 November 2022 (UTC)