I am still a lurker, not a user---although I hope to adopt julia in a year or so for my masters student at a B-school (wish me luck!). teaching it in a class will force me to switch to julia.
I just looked at some random .jl files in the julia source. they did not have a lot of documentation in them---maybe I looked at the wrong ones. one aspect of a language that I think is important is standard doc integration. [I always wished for some small knuth-like intelligently documented code, but none of my past languages had much. (knuth's had too much.)] perl's pod is reasonably good, although a bit clumsy (no easy one-liner pod docs). some more standards would be good, too. every function without a one-liner preceding it could give a warning, for example. every file without an author could give a warning. the julia module name should be automatically considered to be the package name, unless overridden (to avoid double-typing and out-of-sync). and so on. maybe this is all already there and I just did not see it. the "julia docs" on the website did not have a section on "comments and user documentation". one of the aspects that I liked about R was that the question mark gives longer documentation than julia does. the best R doc parts are *always* the plenty of example uses towards the end. I almost always go there first. the "see also" pointers are also very good. right now, I am looking at julia's ?linreg, and I wonder how I would get standard errors, predictions, etc. one of the aspects that I did not like about R was that this was not easy to imitate with an end-user R program. I would have liked to integrate similar "?myfun" for my end-user R function. a second suggestion, also important to me (well, to me and to help my students): ?R.lm should tell me what the equivalent julia function for lm() is, or at least where I should start looking. ?ols could take an intelligent guess at what it is that the user wants to learn, rather than tell me it is not defined. the first would be even more useful if we had a list of the most-used R functions. regards, /iaw
