As an R user I'm surprised to see CRAN held up as a model to aspire to. There is a _lot_ of overlapping functionality among those 6k packages, making it hard to figure out which one is "best" for a particular purpose. There are also a lot of unfocused packages providing miscellaneous collections of functions, which makes it difficult to understand exactly what the package offers you as a user. As a user things are easier if a) each package has a clearly defined scope (i.e., "does one thing well"), and b) there are not too many similar packages to choose from for any particular task. None of this is to say that julia isn't on the right track in terms of packages, just that I question the wisdom of emulating CRAN in this regard.
Best, Ista On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 7:46 PM, Iain Dunning <iaindunn...@gmail.com> wrote: > Yes indeed Christoph, a package that doesn't work is a package that might as > well not exist. Fortunately, and fairly uniquely I think, we can quantify to > some extent how many of our packages are working, and the degree to which > they are. > > In my mind the goal now is "grow fast and don't break too many things", and > I think our pace over the last month or so of around 1 package per day is > fantastic, with good stability of packages (i.e. they pass tests). I've also > noticed that packages being registered now are often of a higher quality > than they used to be, in terms of tests and documentation. I talked about > this a bit at JuliaCon, but in some sense NPM and CRAN represent different > ends of a spectrum of possibilities, and it seems like the consensus is more > towards CRAN. So, we're doing good I think. > > > On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 7:02 PM, Kevin Squire <kevin.squ...@gmail.com> > wrote: >> >> Additional references: PyPI lists 54212 packages, currently (roughly half >> as many as node) but, CRAN only has 6214. >> >> Cheers, >> Kevin >> >> On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 3:37 PM, Sean Garborg <sean.garb...@gmail.com> >> wrote: >>> >>> You wouldn't like node ;) >>> >>> On Wednesday, January 21, 2015 at 4:29:53 PM UTC-7, Christoph Ortner >>> wrote: >>>> >>>> Great that so many are contributing to Julia, but I would question >>>> whether such a large number of packages will be healthy in the long run. It >>>> will make it very difficult for new users to use Julia effectively. >> >> > > > > -- > Iain Dunning > PhD Candidate / MIT Operations Research Center > http://iaindunning.com / http://juliaopt.org
