Great points Ista. I think the main motivation in emulating CRAN is with respect to overall volume of functionality, but your points about too many overlapping or half-baked packages strike home as a former (and still occasional) R user. I think the efforts in the Julia package repository, METADATA, to encourage collaboration and merging packages are the most important and useful in managing the package ecosystem.
As a personal anecdote, I initially created the SQLite.jl package closely following the sqldf R package. After an initial sprint, I had other priorities take over and the package languished a bit. Once I found more time (and need!), I started a redesign of the package from the ground up to be more Julian. Coincidently, at the same time, I came across a reddit thread where Sean Marshallsay had published a post about redesigning the SQLite package to be more Julian as well. I pinged him on reddit to see if he'd be willing to combine efforts on redesigning the package with me and he's contributed some of the most useful functionality now to date (being able to register and run custom julia scalar and aggregate functions in SQLite). I think in another world (or another programming language), I would have seen his post and thought, "Oh well, someone else is creating a competing package." But having grown with the Julia community for a couple years now, I thought I'd reach out about collaborating, and it's certainly worked out quite well for everyone, IMO. Anyway, TL;DR the collaborative nature of the package community is one of my all-time favorite aspects of Julia. -Jacob On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 11:49 AM, Ista Zahn <istaz...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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 >
