# Julia 157 Hacker News commenters recommended Julia and 69 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 8 years (12 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** Recommended for scientific and numerical computing, with near-C speed and math-friendly syntax; critics cite correctness concerns and fragile dependencies in larger projects. ## Why people recommend it - High performance, near C speed (6 comments): "consistently gotten 10x-100x speedups, largely due to how much easier it is to control memory allocations and parallelize more effectively" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46844075)) "Julia does it very well and seems to be gaining a lot of traction as a very high performance but very expressive and safe language." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45853340)) "It is highly interactive and dynamic, yet performant. At the same time I think Julia is failed attempt, with unsolvable problems" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47177942)) - Strong for scientific, numerical computing (6 comments): "found that it had just about everything I was looking for -- an active scientific community, expressiveness, performance, interesting metaprogramming facilities." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47150127)) "Writing fast and elegant ODE solvers, etc in Julia seems to be easier than the others and they've attracted a lot of academics for that reason." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49560692)) "It works perfectly fine in production, and is especially useful if mathematical optimisation is part of your app somewhere" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50054186)) - Expressive, math-friendly syntax (5 comments): "Julia isn't for everyone, but it certainly is for me. I find it to be a very flexible, interesting, and powerful language" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46412930)) "The startup time is not a factor, and the ability to use UTF-8 symbols as variables makes the code more mathematical." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46108022)) "And that's a good thing, because Python+NumPy syntax is far more cumbersome than either Julia or MATLAB's." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48076674)) - Broadcast dot syntax and metaprogramming (6 comments): "I like languages like Julia, as it implicitly abstracts the broadcast operator to handle which areas may be cleanly unrolled." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47803822)) "Broadcast operation (the dot syntax) is another super useful instrument for speeding up vectorized operations." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47178725)) "Languages like Julia trivially handle conditional parallelism much more cleanly with the broadcast operator" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46060152)) ## What people warn about - Correctness and code quality concerns (5 comments): "After using it for a while and following the community (watching talks, checking the forum etc), I don't think it has a concept of code quality." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46054995)) "members of the Julia community have vocally downplayed problems and played the victim when quality concerns have been raised" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49571068)) "That reads to me more like a long-winded example of a Julia user refusing to take correctness issues seriously" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49566908)) - Dependency breakage in larger projects (3 comments): "More like breaking changes, weird issues with basic transitive dependencies breaking after a minor version bump to the language." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49563631)) "Julia is phenomenally great for solo/small projects, but as soon as you have complex dependencies that _you_ can't update" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45853903)) "Not having clearly defined traits in the language made larger projects composing many libraries in Julia difficult." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49361610)) - Lacks static typing (3 comments): "I prefer Julia over Matlab or R. So data science. For production code however, it's not great since it has no static typing." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47178128)) "Julia pretty much remains in there, even though it doesn't really meet the strongly typed initial criteria" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48105850)) "Julia is not a systems language. Also its design (GC, dynamic typing) does not allow it to reach exactly the same level as C++." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48278583)) - Precompilation and development experience (2 comments): "I don't want to sit through precompilation of all dependencies whenever a new machine runs a particular version of the Julia project for the first time" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47076938)) "All I ever wanted from Julia was great a development experience, but it appears to have never quite gotten there." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49695760)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Rust](https://hackerapproved.com/p/rust.md): 2039 recommend - [Go](https://hackerapproved.com/p/go-programming-language.md): 1254 recommend - [Python](https://hackerapproved.com/p/python.md): 1067 recommend - [Zig](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zig.md): 743 recommend - [TypeScript](https://hackerapproved.com/p/typescript.md): 574 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Julia", https://hackerapproved.com/p/julia-programming-language/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).