Looking at Julia Computing industry partners, it isn't that bad.
Re:Fortran
by sundarurfriend on Monday August 28, 2023 @03:55PM
(#37299615)
Fortran still has a big fanbase and people actively fighting to keep it alive and thriving as much as possible. Maybe the crown will remain with C++ (in terms of fast languages), and maybe Rust will eat some of its lunch, but there seems to be a resurgence in the Fortran community to make sure it remains an important language in this space.
Julia has something similar but to a lesser degree. Its main problem has been the developer experience - the latencies (slowly getting better), lack of a great editor/LSP experience (the VS Code plugin is decent, but not yet great), lack of accessible how-to resources (people are starting to write more of these), and things like that.
I don't think Julia has been around quite long enough to make that statement yet.
I've just noticed it's now available on the system I work with, which puts it in the frame for a possible (probably far out still)future move for a massive C/Fortran codebase I maintain.
My general default if I'm going to update something is C++, but from what I see of Julia it's at least worth a look.
How has it “not panned out”? Julia has been in a useable state only for a few years, and is still rapidly developing. Prior to Julia 1.0, I would have said Fortran (which I have 15 years experience with) was the most productive language for scientific computing. Today, Julia is, by a wide margin. In fact, our benchmarks show Julia matching or beating Fortran’s performance, to say nothing of the mich increased flexibility.
I think what you say is true in principle, basically on all counts, but Fortran's niche that its advantages serve best has been continually eaten away at by the Python/C++ combination.
The "I don't know pointers" crowd steers toward Python, and the "I care about CPU cycles" crowd steers toward C++, and that relationship is symbiotic.
Julia promised to be a general-purpose language, both as fast (or faster) than Fortran/C++ and as easy (or easier) than Fortran/Python. But it doesn't seem to have panned out as they'd perhaps have hoped.