JuliaCon 2021 took place from July 28th to 30th, 2021 as an online conference, and afterwards the Julia team prepared some of the information. These include the results of the “Julia User & Developer Survey 2021” presented there, in which Julia users provided insights into the community of the dynamic high-level and high-performance programming language. The most popular language features are just as much a topic as the question of the most popular code editor. Visual Studio Code wins the race by a large margin.
The most popular code editor
Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code is – using the Julia extension – The most popular code editor in the survey: It received 62 percent, followed by Pluto with 23 percent in second place and Vi / Vim / Neovim with 21 percent in third place. Both Pluto and fourth place, Jupyter, are in the current round of the survey for the first time.
The open source editor VS Code has seen a sharp increase since last year, because in 2020 Juno was 39 percent ahead. Only behind did VS Code land in second place with 35 percent, while the bronze medal went to JupyterLab with 31 percent.
Performance and community are very important
In the survey, Julia users should indicate what their most popular technical and non-technical features of the programming language are (multiple answers allowed).
It turned out that from a technical point of view, the community particularly appreciates the performance (85 percent), followed by the simplicity of the application (69 percent) and that the code is open source and is adaptable (66 percent) . The most popular non-technical feature also took first place: Julia is available free of charge (80 percent). At 70 percent, the community itself is the second most popular non-technical “feature” because, according to the results of the survey, it is “talented and active”. The community also got third place, there on the grounds that they were “warm and welcoming” (48 percent).
When asked which programming language they would use as a second choice for Julia tasks, 75 percent answered with Python; 30 percent would choose C ++ and 29 percent would use MATLAB.
Diversity in the community
In the survey, 84 percent of those questioned identify themselves as male, 4 percent as female and 1 percent as non-binary; 11 percent preferred not to answer this question. However, the Julia team notes that the percentage of female visitors to docs.julialang.org has almost doubled in two years – with an increase from 13 percent to 24 percent between 2019 and 2021.
5 percent of those surveyed identify themselves as LGBTQ, and 26 percent consider themselves to be in a group that is underrepresented in IT or science, for reasons of age (6 percent), origin (5 percent) or the level of education of their parents (3 percent) .
Background and methodology
The very young programming language Julia was founded nine years ago. The four founding members Dr. Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, Dr. Viral B. Shah and Prof. Alan Edelman set out their motives in a blog entry at the time. Julia should be an easy-to-learn, high-performance open source language for general and scientific purposes. So far, Julia has missed the top 20 in the RedMonk ranking, probably due to the niche of statistical use also occupied by Python and R TIOBE index for August 2021 Julia reaches rank 26.
The survey results of the “Julia User & Developer Survey 2021” are based on 2,660 online interviews among Julia users and developers from June 2 to July 7, 2021. The Julia team used various channels such as Slack, Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook and asked the questions in English, Chinese, Japanese and Spanish. The survey slides by Andrew Claster, Director of Marketing & Communications, and Dr. Viral B. Shah, are available online.
This and other highlights of JuliaCon 2021 handles a blog post. JuliaCon took place for the eighth time in 2021, and those interested can read the over 300 recorded sessions of the online conference watch on YouTube. Julia is currently lying in version 1.6.
(May)
