[sjkelly]

I think even since 2014 there have been many niche technical computing companies supporting development quite successfully. Bigger players definitely would help, but I think most of that at this time is more public/private research money for scientific computing. Hence Julia has many academic contributors (grad students and post docs a likely majority), many of which are now becoming professors and industry leaders.

The post 1.0 world in Julia has been spectacular for development stability. In the early days it was somewhat tiring trying to develop basic foundational libraries, and keep pace with language changes. 1.0 has stabilized things quite a bit, and the forthcoming LTS (sometime this year maybe) I think will really start to button up some of the major issues people have with package load times and installation.

[veddox]

Yes, writing pre-1.0 Julia code was like balancing on a log in the water - the platform kept moving under you :D I'm glad it's gotten a lot stabler now.

And I agree about academics as a key user base. I think Julia's growth is far from over, there's a lot of organic spread yet to come. It may never replace Python in terms of global popularity, but then, why should it have to?