Honestly I'm convinced it's a lot more generally applicable than scientific computing. Much of heavy lifting I had to do in C, I can now do in Julia with nearly the same speed and efficiency. Plus, for a lot of the problems I would have chosen Python, Ruby, or even Clojure for, I could really see myself using Julia now.

Same here. In my so-far limited experience, it feels like the upgrade to Python 2 that I wish Python 3 had been.

+1 Besides libs and ecosystem in general, I don't see any advantage Python / Ruby / Clojure have over Julia.

And libs/tooling naturally come along with active use, which I think Julia is going to start seeing real soon. At least from me!

I agree, the libs ecosystem is growing at an amazing pace (partly because macros make it easy to create wrappers around C, Python or Java libs).

Eh, in the case of Closure pervasive immutability, I don't want to write imperative code anymore. I am sure you could write in a functional style in Julia but all the code I have seen seems to rely pretty heavily on explicit stateful loops. At that seems to be a design choice not just for speed but, from what I have read elsewhere, to be familiar to Fortran and Matlab people, seems like a bad trade off to me.

Removing loops or mutability from Julia would be a terrible decision. There's nothing inherently wrong with mutability or imperative programming.

I just was answering the case for the advantage of Clojure over Julia as a general purpose language. And pervasive immutability is an advantage in that case. I agree Julia needs mutable arrays, I think for the domain it is targeting mutable arrays are a must but that should not mean that it needs big old imperative loops absolutely everywhere either.

Imperative and mutable isn't inherently wrong, even in a general purpose language like Julia.

In Clojure it's hard to write imperative code, which was one of the reasons I've left. Sometimes, imperative programming is the best way to code something. Sometimes it's best to do it in a functional way. Julia can do both.

The same is true for mutability. I understand the advantages of immutability but I think it's overhyped. Besides the obvious advantage of mutability - performance - it sometimes makes for more readable and shorter code. And what if you have some complex nested state and need to change a small part of it?

BTW - what do you mean by functional programming exactly, how does it differ from imperative programming in your view?

I also really like Clojure (we use it exclusively at work) especially thanks to its referential transparency. But I don't think I'll ever want to exclusively write in a Clojure style. Sometimes I prefer imperative stateful algorithms.

I can see Julia replacing Go for a lot of people, specifically those who came from a Python or Ruby background and are using Go for the kind of things more typically written in those languages. I bet Julia will shine in this problem space.

Any reasoning behind such a generically bold statement?

- Good performance

- Lisp-like macros and other metaprogramming facilities

- It's a general purpose language

- Multiple dispatch

- Designed for parallelism and distributed computation

> Any reasoning behind such a generically bold statement?

If and when they're right, they can smugly point out how forward thinking they were.