2025-07-23 –, Main Room 1 (Main stage)
The Julia Programming Language solves the so-called "two-language problem." 2 - 1 = 1, which is fantastic. Here DocstringTranslation.jl
package and some derived packages translate Julia's documentation written in a language called English into the user's preferred language, which also reduces the issue of yet another two-language problem.
The Julia Programming Language solves the so-called "two-language problem." 2 - 1 = 1, which is fantastic news for scientific researchers. It allows us to write code with high-level operations without losing execution performance.
In reality, to understand how to use Julia, we also need to install another language, so-called English in our brain to read documentation, write docstrings, listen to talks on YouTube, and ask something in Slack, Discord, or Discourse. If you're a native speaker of English, it's OK. However, that will happen to those in non-English-speaking countries such as Japan. This is yet another two-language problem.
I'm Japanese and living in Japan. Japan is considered a non-English-speaking country. People in Japan who are an expert in a scientific domain, even having Ph.D students, are not always good at English. I write blog posts in Japanese about the Julia language in terms of engineering to help Japanese people.
I often refer to the package and official Julia documentation to provide accurate information. They are written in English. For Japanese people, reading long sentences in English takes much time, and writing them takes even more time.
The spread of Julia in Japan is community-based, and the implicit requirement is that the populariser must be familiar with English. This implicit requirement is non-trivial, and very few people fulfill it. This is one of the reasons why the Julia language is not a primary programming language in Japan.
People who are used to English have little incentive to read texts written in Japanese, which is not their mother tongue unless they have a good reason to do so. It would be sad if the useful findings discussed in Japan were not shared and appreciated by the rest of the world.
By the way, AI (Artificial intelligence) and LLM (large language model) have made it possible to translate texts easily. Could this be applied to the Julia ecosystem? One of these ideas is DocstringTranslation.jl. This tool translates Julia's docstrings into other natural languages to help users understand the manual.
It is not yet on the general registry but is available with a Chat GPT API key, which will be useful to many people.
I develop some Julia packages on GitHub.
See https://github.com/AtelierArith
I also use Julia in the industry domain.