Broken link for julia-1.4.0.pdf?

[dslate1]

On the Julia 1.4 Documentation page, the link to julia-1.4.0.pdf (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/JuliaLang/docs.julialang.org/assets/julia-1.4.0.pdf) seems to be broken.

[ViralBShah]

We had the same issue with 1.3.0.

#33968 is the tracking issue.

[dslate1]

Just a thought: perhaps when you post a link like that, someone should actually verify that it works?

[fredrikekre]

Just a thought: perhaps when you post a link like that, someone should actually verify that it works?

Yea, perhaps. We only have so many volunteers. Would be great if you wanted to get involved!

Anyway, I spent the day (literally) fixing the root cause so the pdf is up now.

[ViralBShah]

I would second @fredrikekre here. We always need more help. So, even testing these things out in the RC process and opening small PRs to make things polished would be a great help.

@fredrikekre thanks for chasing this one!

[dslate1]

Thanks guys for fixing the link to julia-1.4.0.pdf. Actually, when I first discovered Julia back in 2012 I became fairly active in reporting and discussing issues with your dev group, mostly involving documentation although some about Julia's behavior itself. Then I abandoned Julia for several years, primarily because I got heavily into using R for machine learning purposes, such as Kaggle contests, and I didn't think Julia was ready to replace R in that regard. Then recently, in my eternal search for better programming languages, I decided to see how Julia had progressed. So I dusted off some old Julia code I had written and got it working (after a bunch of mods to conform to 8 years of changes to the language). I also tried out the R package JuliaCall to see if I could combine the versatility of R with the hopefully better execution speed of Julia for low level code. Although JuliaCall seems to work fairly well (except for some problem involving crashes during parallel processing), I found it a bit too confusing to keep switching my 75 year old brain between the two languages.

I like a lot of the ideas in Julia, such as the type system, multiple dispatch, transparent conversions and promotions, just-in-time compilation, etc., so I hope it continues to progress. You may yet hear from me again if I encounter issues worth reporting.

[ViralBShah]

Thank you for that note, and we would certainly like to hear issues you run into. Avoiding switching between two languages is precisely why we started Julia, so I can certainly sympathize!