Julia Package Ecosystem Pulse

As primarily an R &#x2F; stats user, the progress Julia has been making in terms of libraries has been staggering. I have just enough historic experience with Python to be similarly impressed if I place myself in that mindset.<p>I recently attended a Software Carpentry instructor training session and witnessed a breakout between social scientists using R and natural sciences people using Python. Julia will have &quot;made it&quot; when orgs like SWC can start reasonably offering Julia sessions that draw both communities.

I&#x27;ve been giving Julia a shot lately because I really like MATLAB syntax and IJulia is awesome for analysis reports. There are a few warts though:<p>1. I really don&#x27;t like how the entire standard library is included in the default namespace. I know this is how MATLAB does it, but my function names are constantly colliding with built-in ones.<p>2. The documentation is hard to navigate. I&#x27;m used to MSDN. Compared to that, providing huge pages of functions with a sentence or two of prose and no examples is not that helpful.<p>3. Plotting tools need work. Gadfly produces beautiful output but interactivity is weak (you can only zoom in on Y-axis) and it chokes when you tell it to plot a lot of data. It should downsample based on display resolution... I should be able to tell it to graph 100,000 points without crashing my browser.

I&#x27;ve been using Julia 0.3 for algorithmic trading in production for about 3 months now, and the language is truly, astoundingly productive. The only thing lacking for me at this point is true multithreading support (so I can fork off a python thread from within julia) - I currently get around this by using a socket interface to pass messages to python.<p>Edit: For anyone who&#x27;s interested, an indicative problem is this: <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21113030/async-thread-deadlock-in-julia-when-used-with-pycall" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;21113030&#x2F;async-thread-dea...</a>

I should point out the main Julia package listing is at <a href="http://pkg.julialang.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pkg.julialang.org&#x2F;</a>, this is the &quot;executive summary&quot; page. At the bottom of this &quot;Pulse&quot; page are test results - we run the tests for every package every night on both Julia stable (0.3) and unstable (0.4) to make sure everything is still working nicely together. Although, breakages on 0.4 just mean cool stuff is happening on master.

I was thinking the other day, before 2004, did we ever say &quot;ecosystem&quot; to refer to a bunch of software packages in a particular domain? I have a feeling that this book is what convinced us all to refer to our software collections as an ecosystem, and we have forgotten that it was this book&#x27;s idea:<p><a href="http://www.amazon.ca/Software-Ecosystem-Understanding-Indispensable-Technology/dp/0262633310" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.ca&#x2F;Software-Ecosystem-Understanding-Indisp...</a><p>The word is ubiquitous now, but if you think about it, it&#x27;s a bit of a funny way to refer to software, with allusions to predators, prey, producers, consumers, and population dynamics.

I&#x27;ve written a few small Julia programs and have found it to be a very productive language, in most respects. Unfortunately its module system is horrid. If you look at almost all Julia programs, they are essentially one big file. Any secondary files just get included into a main file wholeclothe. It&#x27;s like working with archaic PHP all over again.

The stars seem to indicate popularity but not quality. They should have people rate it 1-5 and give a histogram like other places do, it&#x27;s much more informative.

Any recommendations for books for a Matlab user looking to use Julia? Thanks

Calling julia functions from python would be nice