[optimali]

The library is still more sparse than other languages, but for implementing methods on your own there is no better alternative. Also for using existing libraries and functions, I found pycall to be very fast and easy to use.

I also used rcall a little and while not as nice as pycall was still simple to use and allowed access to any functionality I was interested in. I've heard good things about ccall/Cxx but haven't had a chance to use them yet.

http://julialang.org/teaching/ has some examples of where it is being used for teaching