[jasode]

>My question is then, why bring up Julia at all?

Because he wasn't writing about Python in a vacuum. In his very first paragraph[1], one can see that the article was a response to Julia's benchmark.

Your question could be reversed for the authors of julialang.org website and they could've restricted themselves to say "here are some ways of writing functions in Julia" -- without bringing up Python at all.

But the Julia folks didn't do that because ... people like to write comparisons to other things!

[1] see 1st paragraph that begins and ends with: "Should we ditch Python and other languages in favor of Julia for technical computing? [...] did the Julia team wrote Python benchmarks the best way for Python?"