Is Julia the Snake Charmer?
MIT’s Julia has come to stay in the field of Data Science and challenge the Top Dog Python
When talking about data science then Python is the programming language of choice for a lot of developers. However, MIT’s new programming language Julia has arrived to challenge this choice. This article’s objective is to elaborate to which degree Julia has already found a way in the minds of developers by analyzing Stack Overflow surveys from 2016–2020.
There are a lot of great articles about Python and Julia as well as the respective comparison of both programming languages e.g. [1],[2],[3]. Findings prove that Julia has the potential to be the Top Dog in data science, but what are the naked numbers telling?
The trend of questions on Stack Overflow speaks a clear language. Python is the most searched and discussed language currently on Stack Overflow. By comparing the amount of questions regarding Julia and Python, it seems that Julia is almost non-existent in developer’s minds, whereas 1 out of 6 questions on Stack Overflow is related to Python [4].
However, when we are diving deeper into the data, trends show a significant and continuous increase of Julia related questions, leaving the question open, if Julia is steadily becoming more and more relevant for data related development. In order to answer this questions, this article targets to answer following three questions:
- How many of the interviewees had worked with Julia compared to Python?
- How many people are planning to work with Julia?
- And are people in data related jobs more likely to use Julia in 2020?
Julia isn’t very relevant for the Stack Overflow Community. (Yet!)
Unfortunately, there is no data in the years between 2016 and 2019 for people working with Julia which can probably be traced back due to missing selection options for Julia as a programming language.
The survey data shows that less than 1% of the interviewees have worked with Julia in 2020. This is equivalent to 520 Julia users in 2020. Comparing this number to the almost 40% of interviewees working with Python, it seems that Julia is still missing a huge user base. However, the relative number of users has more than doubled since 2017.
The community increasingly wants to learn Julia!
The trend of more and more people using Julia is affirmed by the increasing numbers of people wanting to learn Julia to tackle their data related challenges.
Especially people in data related fields are interested in working with Julia in 2020
There is a significant higher number that a person is using Julia, when it comes to this person’s occupation. People working in data-related jobs are more likely to know Julia.
And even more people are willing to learn Julia, when they are working in a data environment. Almost 7% of the 2020 interviewees stated that they wanted to learn Julia in the future.
Conclusion
Julia isn’t the natural choice to tackle data science challenges for most people. Nonetheless, this article showed that more and more people are getting aware of Julia and are willing to learn this new language. Especially people working in data-related fields are interested in Julia.
Still, Julia has a long way to go to become the preferred choice of language in data science.
What is your opinion about Julia? Are you already using it? Or are you willing to learn Julia? Please leave your thoughts in the comments.
References
[1] Rose, S. (2019), Advantages of Using Python for Machine Learning, https://medium.com/@scarlett8285/advantages-of-using-python-for-machine-learning-8d2093697e8f
[2] Moutafis, R. (2020), Bye-bye Python. Hello Julia!, https://towardsdatascience.com/bye-bye-python-hello-julia-9230bff0df62
[3] Devathon (2020), Julia vs Python 2020, https://medium.com/@devathon_/julia-vs-python-in-2020-d2dc2c2ef3f
[4] Stack Overflow Insights (2021), Stack Overflow Trends, https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=julia%2Cpython
[5] Stack Overflow Insights (2021), Stack Overflow Trends, https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=julia
