What's bad about Julia?

Julia is my favorite programming language. More than that actually, perhaps I’m a bit of a fanboy. Sometimes, though, the ceaseless celebration of Julia by fans like me can be a bit too much. It papers over legitimate problems in the language, hindering progress. And from an outsider perspective, it’s not only insufferable (I would guess), but also obfuscates the true pros and cons of the language. Learning why you may not want to choose to use a tool is just as important as learning why you may.

This post is about all the major disadvantages of Julia. Some of it will just be rants about things I particularly don’t like - hopefully they will be informative, too. A post like this is necessarily subjective. For example, some people believe Julia’s lack of a Java-esque OOP is a design mistake. I don’t, so the post won’t go into that.

Table of contents

  1. Table of contents
  2. Compile time latency
  3. Large memory consumption
  4. Julia can’t easily integrate into other languages
  5. Weak static analysis
  6. The core language is unstable
  7. The ecosystem is immature
  8. The type system works poorly
  9. You can’t extend existing types with data
  10. Abstract interfaces are unenforced and undiscoverable
  11. Subtyping is an all-or-nothing thing
  12. The iterator protocol is weird and too hard to use
  13. The protocol
  14. The problem
  15. Functional programming primitives are not well designed

Read in full here:

https://viralinstruction.com/posts/badjulia/

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