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I don't really know what kind of rebuttal you're looking for, but I will link my HN comments from when this was first posted for some thoughts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31396861#31398796. As I said, in the linked post, I'm quite skeptical of the business of trying to assess relative buginess of programming in different systems, because that has strong dependencies on what you consider core vs packages and what exactly you're trying to do.
However, bugs in general suck and we've been thinking a fair bit about what additional tooling the language could provide to help people avoid the classes of bugs that Yuri encountered in the post.
The biggest class of problems in the blog post, is that it's pretty clear that `@inbounds` (and I will extend this to `@assume_effects`, even though that wasn't around when Yuri wrote his post) is problematic, because it's too hard to write. My proposal for what to do instead is at https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/50641.
Another common theme is that while Julia is great at composition, it's not clear what's expected to work and what isn't, because the interfaces are informal and not checked. This is a hard design problem, because it's quite close to the reasons why Julia works well. My current thoughts on that are here: https://github.com/Keno/InterfaceSpecs.jl but there's other proposals also.
I don't really know what kind of rebuttal you're looking for, but I will link my HN comments from when this was first posted for some thoughts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31396861#31398796. As I said, in the linked post, I'm quite skeptical of the business of trying to assess relative buginess of programming in different systems, because that has strong dependencies on what you consider core vs packages and what exactly you're trying to do.
However, bugs in general suck and we've been thinking a fair bit about what additional tooling the language could provide to help people avoid the classes of bugs that Yuri encountered in the post.
The biggest class of problems in the blog post, is that it's pretty clear that `@inbounds` (and I will extend this to `@assume_effects`, even though that wasn't around when Yuri wrote his post) is problematic, because it's too hard to write. My proposal for what to do instead is at https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/50641.
Another common theme is that while Julia is great at composition, it's not clear what's expected to work and what isn't, because the interfaces are informal and not checked. This is a hard design problem, because it's quite close to the reasons why Julia works well. My current thoughts on that are here: https://github.com/Keno/InterfaceSpecs.jl but there's other proposals also.
There is no rebuttal because nothing much has really changed culture wise. Sure, the various @inbounds issues and concrete bugs that are mentioned in Yuris post have mostly been addressed, but the larger point (that is, "what can I actually expect/get guaranteed when calling a given function?") definitely hasn't been, at least not culturally. Documentation of pre- and postconditions are still lackluster, PRs trying to establish that for functions in Base stall for unclear reasons/don't get followups and when you try to talk about that on Slack retorts boil down to "we're tired of hearing you complain about this" instead of trying to find a systemic solution to that problem. Until that changes, I have large doubts about Yuris post losing relevance.
My own efforts (shameless plug, https://github.com/Seelengrab/PropCheck.jl for property based testing inspired by Hedgehog and https://github.com/Seelengrab/RequiredInterfaces.jl for somewhat formalizing "what methods are needed to subtype an abstract type") are unused in the wider community as far as I can tell, in spite of people speaking highly of them when coming across them. I also don't think Kenos InterfaceSpecs.jl is the way forward either - I think there's quite a lot of design space left in the typesystem the language could do without reaching for z3 and other SAT/SMT solvers. I personally attribute the lack of progress on that front to the lack of coherent direction of the project at large (and specifically not to the failings of individuals - folks are always very busy with their lives outside of Julia development/other priorities). In spite of the fact that making this single area better could be a big boon with more traditional software engineers, which are very underrepresented in the community.
There is no rebuttal because nothing much has really changed culture wise. Sure, the various @inbounds issues and concrete bugs that are mentioned in Yuris post have mostly been addressed, but the larger point (that is, "what can I actually expect/get guaranteed when calling a given function?") definitely hasn't been, at least not culturally. Documentation of pre- and postconditions are still lackluster, PRs trying to establish that for functions in Base stall for unclear reasons/don't get followups and when you try to talk about that on Slack retorts boil down to "we're tired of hearing you complain about this" instead of trying to find a systemic solution to that problem. Until that changes, I have large doubts about Yuris post losing relevance.
My own efforts (shameless plug, https://github.com/Seelengrab/PropCheck.jl for property based testing inspired by Hedgehog and https://github.com/Seelengrab/RequiredInterfaces.jl for somewhat formalizing "what methods are needed to subtype an abstract type") are unused in the wider community as far as I can tell, in spite of people speaking highly of them when coming across them. I also don't think Kenos InterfaceSpecs.jl is the way forward either - I think there's quite a lot of design space left in the typesystem the language could do without reaching for z3 and other SAT/SMT solvers. I personally attribute the lack of progress on that front to the lack of coherent direction of the project at large (and specifically not to the failings of individuals - folks are always very busy with their lives outside of Julia development/other priorities). In spite of the fact that making this single area better could be a big boon with more traditional software engineers, which are very underrepresented in the community.
