[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.