The issues about the lack of tooling and stability are well heeded. Unfortunately, we at the Julia Lab at MIT, like our colleagues that are the JuMP group at the MIT ORC, are limited to working on things that can be justified as research activities. Developing new algorithms and applying them to scientific computing activities is research; writing a debugger and testing framework is not. For non-research development we have had to rely on the goodwill from hundreds of open source community developers, which have helped improve Julia and its package offerings immeasurably.

Happily, the present situation is more rosy than it has ever been. Funding agencies are beginning to realize that academic software development is an activity worth funding in its own right, not necessarily tied to research. Julia Computing has also been fortunate to receive funding from organizations such as the Moore Foundation to work on precisely the tools that users most need, but are difficult to justify development with research funds.