[Ajoo]

I think it's meant to compete with the likes of MATLAB, Python/Scipy and R which are probably the most used languages in scientific research. As it stands now most prototyping is done in one of those high level languages and only if you really need the speedup do you port it to C/C++. Julia wants to be a high level dynamic language where you get the speedup for free.

[af3]

Gotcha. I see people are trying to use numpy for CPU intense computations (eg. FFT back and forth), and then they ask why it SO slow?!..