I have high hopes for Julia becoming the defacto open-source scientific language. Despite Python and R both having a massive head start, I'm willing to bet that talented engineers and scientists will be drawn to Julia to implement their next-generation frameworks owing to the powerful features that it offers.
For example, the fact that an array of unions such as Array{Union{Missing,T}} is represented in memory as a much more efficient union of arrays is a perfect example of where a clever compiler can make the logical thing to do also the efficient thing to do!
For example, the fact that an array of unions such as Array{Union{Missing,T}} is represented in memory as a much more efficient union of arrays is a perfect example of where a clever compiler can make the logical thing to do also the efficient thing to do!