> Julia lets you compose unrelated libraries much more freely than most other languages do. That's very powerful, but if you come into it expecting all of those compositions to magically work, I think you just have an unrealistic expectation.
Yep, and it is unfortunate that this unrealistic expectation is explicitly encouraged by the creators of the language:
> It is actually the case in Julia that you can take generic algorithms that were written by one person and custom types that were written by other people and just use them together efficiently and effectively.
It seems worth reiterating that on a personal level I really like and appreciate the vast majority of the folks I’ve met in the Julia community. I’m glad I got to hang out with them and learn from them. But in my opinion setting expectations like this fosters bad science.
Your perspective tracks with mine. Without contracts, either specified in documentation or as static guarantees, it is hard or impossible to build robust programs.
In Julia it's almost as if every function is an interface, with (usually quite terse) documentation as its only semantic constraint. For example, here is the full documentation for `+`: https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/base/math/#Base.:+
I love Game Programming Patterns, by the way! Laughed out loud when I first saw the back cover.
The person who eventually fixed the issue, mkitti, had to push through a lot of "institutional" friction to do so, and the eventual fix is the result of his determined efforts.
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