I get the impression that the communities are different. Not that Julia's is "more energetic" (there's actually quite a bit of activity around CL too), but that it's simply a different crowd. The Julia people seem to me to be coming more from the application side of things - computational scientists who want to do a certain job - while the CL people are more interested in CL as a language, without a specific application field in mind. So although neither of the communities are especially large, the Julia bunch have been more focused on good libraries for scientific computation, which is why their ecosystem is better in that respect. (Also, the "Lisp curse": scientists are more likely to choose Julia as a new language, because it looks more like the languages they already know.)
Source: I do computational biology with Julia, hobby projects in Common Lisp.
Re:Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
by eigenspace on Tuesday May 21, 2019 @10:29PM
(#19977209)
True, if I was more careful I’d say Julia’s scientific / numerical community is more energetic. I definitely don’t want to sound like I’m dissing CL as I have great respect for it and want to be better acquainted one day.
Julia is influenced by the Common Lisp Object System. But it made it fast for numerical computing. So there is a Julia lesson for CLOS...
http://p-cos.blogspot.com/2014/07/a-lispers-first-impression...
Re:Free Wolfram Engine for Developers
by eigenspace on Tuesday May 21, 2019 @10:25PM
(#19977188)
Indeed, and that actually played into my path to using Julia. I had fallen down the lisp rabbit hole and was super interested in the ideas it advocates and was trying to decide on a dialect to try to commit to for my physics numerical work. After spending some time in decision paralysis (even though in hindsight, CL was probably the clear dialect to choose), I discovered that Julia actually inherited a lot of good ideas from the lisp family and that it had its fair share of cool ideas of its own. Eventually, I made up my mind and settled on Julia as my main language, though I screw around with elisp every now and then for my emacs config.
I’d like to come back to CL at some point though and gain some proficiency as I think there’s a lot in CL left for Julia to learn from.
My understanding though is that most of the statements I made also apply in CL though my impression at least from the point of view of scientific computation is that Julia's community is more energetic than CL's. Certainly Julia still has lessons to learn from CL though.