I remember liking JuMP, but Julia itself didn't feel ready yet. Some of the packages had weird behaviors. For example, Gadfly took several minutes to render some of my charts. IIRC when I looked at the source, it was solving a MIP to compute the best bounding box for display purposes.
Julia (and the Gadfly package, which it's worth noting is not a standard library or anything like that) have come a long way since 2014. JuMP too. Julia was indeed "not ready" in 2014; it wasn't anywhere near the 1.0 release. We're now on the 1.7.x releases: stable and guaranteed backward compatible since 1.0, and a lot of quality of life improvements between 1.0 and 1.7, including much faster compilation.
If I'm solving an optimization problem for personal curiosity, a blog post, etc., JuMP is the tool I reach for. :)
Wow, 2014 and Julia v0.2! That's pretty amazing really haha. That's the "before times". That's so long ago that most of the things tracking Julia's growth start tracking after that time, and the vast majority of users today hadn't even heard of Julia at that time. I would definitely open up Julia again some time treating it like essentially a wholly different language. Things like precompilation, package compiler, Plots.jl, etc. only came into being much later, so definitely OP should scratch the old workflow and try it fresh.
I remember liking JuMP, but Julia itself didn't feel ready yet. Some of the packages had weird behaviors. For example, Gadfly took several minutes to render some of my charts. IIRC when I looked at the source, it was solving a MIP to compute the best bounding box for display purposes.
I should probably check it out again.
Also: agreed regarding Gurobi licensing.