A grateful scientist

[Yakir Gagnon]

Hi Julia community and developers,

I'm a postdoc researching color vision, biological optics, polarization vision, and camouflage. I've always used Matlab in my research and made the switch to Julia about two years ago. I just wanted to report, for what it's worth, that as a researcher I think Julia is the best. I promote it everywhere I think it's appropriate, and use it almost exclusively. 

Just wanted to say a big fat thank you to all the developers and community for creating this magnificence.

THANK YOU! 

[Stefan Karpinski]

Thank you for writing this – it's a lovely thing to wake up to. I'm sure all the others who make Julia happen and read this list daily feel the same.

[Jon Norberg]

Utterly seconding that. Amazing community and beautiful language.

Thanks all!

Jon Norberg

[Scott T]

I'll add my voice to say thanks as well! I made the switch from Python to Julia for some astrophysical models in my PhD, because I suck at C and Fortran and didn't like the messiness of dealing with something like Cython. Julia has been great for this and has introduced me gently to the usefulness of types and how to program for speed without throwing me in the deep end. I look forward to the day I can introduce people to it without having to preface the introduction with "You probably won't care about what I'm saying until the language and packages are more stable, but..."

Scott T

[Scott T]

(Oh and Yakir, your work sounds like one of the coolest interdisciplinary mixes I could possibly think of.)

[Gabriel Gellner]

Seriously +9000 to this sentiment.

I am new to Julia but man what this community has made is incredible. The beauty of this project staggers me. Not having to mess around with C for a large chunk of my new codes inner loops feels like magic every time.

Thank you all so much.

Gabriel

[Alireza Nejati]

I've been coding in julia so much lately that I actually think my brain might be forgetting the other languages I used to know!

[Christopher Fisher]

I work with mathematical models of cognition and switched to Julia from Matlab about a year and a half ago. Aside from the debugger (step,step in, etc.), I don't miss Matlab all. Once the statistical packages mature, I'll phase out R too. I think the language is shaping up quite well and the community has been very helpful for technical support. I'll be sure to cite Julia in future papers.

[Yakir Gagnon]

Thanks Scott T! 

[Andre Bieler]

I +1 on the thanks from scientist. 

I changed 90% of my data analysis scripts from Python to Julia and never looked back.

For what its worth: I have an upcoming paper in Nature on Thursday that of course credits the Julia language! :) (Its the least I could do)

It really made my research easier by being able to go through a lot of data in much shorter time than all of my Python scripts

could handle before!

[Stefan Karpinski]

Mentioning Julia and any Julia packages used for published work is greatly appreciated!

[Jonathan Malmaud]

As someone who volunteers my free time to developing Julia, it means a lot to hear that.

[Yakir Gagnon]

Wow, I'm glad there's been such a positive response! I meant every word and more. I too have a publication coming up soon (albeit not in Nature -- which is beyond awesome) and Julia is referenced there. As it will probably be in every publication I have from now on.

Thanks again!

[Eric Forgy]

Hi Jonathan,

I'm in the same boat as a grateful scientist/entrepreneur and thank all the Julia developers, but since we're at it, I want to say a special "Thank you" to YOU for all the work you've done on JuliaWeb. Requests.jl, in particular, is making my life much easier. It's become an invaluable tool for my team for testing our APIs (and I've learned a lot by watching the incremental improvements). We are still building up our Julia skills and hope we can start contributing back as well.

[Jonathan Malmaud]

Thanks Eric! 

[John Gibson]

I'll join in here as well. For years I've seen the mess associated with existing languages like C, C++, and Fortran as a very substantial impediment to students developing professional-level expertise in scientific computation, and in fact I've shied away from trying to teach what I know, because there's so much tedious overhead. 

But all of a sudden, I have a language I feel good about teaching, which my students like learning, and which won't limit them in the long run. As gentle a learning curve as Matlab, as general-purpose as Python, as powerful as Lisp, and as fast as C. And free. It's a totally winning combination. 

Since attending JuliaCon2015 this summer I have transitioned my graduate numerical linear algebra course at U New Hampshire to Julia. I'll do undergrad numerical methods in Julia next fall, and over the next year or so I'll try to convince relevant departments that Julia belongs in our freshman/sophomore level intro to engineering computing courses. 

Many, many thanks to the Julia team for recognizing the need for a better language, and then for designing and implementing it so well. I'm really grateful.

John

[Patrick Kofod Mogensen]

I'll get in the "Thank you!" line. I'm still learning every day, but I use Julia for pretty much everything (Economics Ph.D. student here). So yeah, thanks a lot - and a special thanks to Andreas Noack for transmitting the Julia-bug before leaving UCPH.