[dannyz]

In terms of numerical computing I don't think this is going to be a battle of core language speed, Python has already lost here. The question is going to be what are the advantages of a language designed with a focus on number crunching vs a multi-purpose language with some number crunching extensions.

I mostly do scientific computing but I really enjoy the toolchain of an extremely popular multi-purpose programming language (Python) + C extensions where necessary for speed. The reason is that many tasks these days are not just pure number crunching. If I need to start up a quick web server, do some web site scraping, basically anything can be done easily from Python. It's unlikely Julia will ever be able to catch-up in these areas.