[derbOac]

I've been a user of Julia for some time (at least since beta versions). I love the language and feel like the author of the blog post is maybe exaggerating or generalizing a bit too much. On the other hand, based on my personal experiences with Julia, I can definitely empathize and feel like there's a lot about the blog post that rings true.

I share your sense that "something is just missing in Julia" but I maybe disagree with the author in that I see it as potentially changeable or something, as not hopeless.

Julia has grown tremendously in a short period of time, both in the language, its implementation, and the size of the community. So in that sense I see it as inevitable there's going to be a lot of bugs and chaos for a bit.

On the other hand, I've always felt a bit of unease that a numerical language was being developed from the ground up as that, without it being an offshoot of more general purpose language. It's not that I think there's something inherently wrong with it, but I do think that having a greater variety of perspectives looking at it are more likely to catch things early.

I don't think in this regard it's a function of academia -- although it certainly could be -- it's more a function of having a very narrow community looking at the language. Regardless of how smart they all are, I think having a broader range of perspectives might catch things earlier.

In this regard, I might have preferred the Julia fervor and effort be put into some numerical Nim libraries, or a numerical "abstracted subset of Rust" or something. It's not so much I dislike Julia as much as it is I'd feel safer with a more generalist perspective on basic language design.

But who knows. To me it's a bit ironic the author focuses on Python as an alternative, because it's not like that is free from problems, and Python has been around for a lot longer. They might be different problems, but they're not absent. Python is a bit ironic too in that it has been sort of kludged together over time into what it is today, for better or worse. I guess it feels like to me all the major numerical programming platforms have this kind of kludgy feeling in different ways; Julia feels/felt a bit like an opportunity for a clean break, if nothing else.

[jbezanson]

I don't think there is anything "numerical" about the core language design of julia; it is just a general generic-function-based OO language. In fact I think we made many decisions in line with trends in the broader language world, e.g. emphasizing immutable objects, having no concrete inheritance, using tasks and channels for concurrency, and deliberately avoiding "matlab-y" features like implicit array resizing. Of course many in the "general purpose" crowd don't like 1-based indexing, but surely that is not the source of all of our problems :)

[derbOac]

Fair enough, I might have to eat my words a bit. Julia does have a lot to offer in terms of language characteristics, that's true, and I think part of the appeal. It has been a breath of fresh air, and feels well-thought out from basic principles. But along the lines of the original linked article, it's maybe worth thinking about why Julia hasn't seen more widespread adoption in say, web servers or systems programming, etc and so forth. I don't mean that as a criticism, just that I do think it's been marketed (or received) as a numerical computing language, and that's the community that it's primarily developed around for one reason or another, with its concomitant specific blind spots (as do all language communities).

For what it's worth, I prefer 1-based indexing.

My guess is a lot of what's in the post is probably tied to growing pains and maybe butterfly effects of novel language features on bigger-picture patterns. It would be interesting to see where things were at at a similar stage in other languages.