I've only been learning for about a week, but I think if you're a nerd for language design, you will appreciate it on an aesthetic level as a very tight design around a powerful concept. Common Lisp also has multiple dispatch, but I feel the integration of it into all the nooks and crannies of Julia really pays off. Julia's performance doesn't appear as a side effect of building on the LLVM or because they over-optimized the core, as it does in many young performance-oriented languages. Instead, it appears as a tangible benefit of a multiple-dispatch oriented design that makes it easy to add information to the system to improve performance without compromising the clarity of a sketch.
I have often felt that there are many discontinuities between "pretty" Haskell as it is taught and pragmatic Haskell. I haven't used Julia enough in anger to say it for sure, but I see in the way it works great potential for the pragmatic code to be as beautiful as the high-level and abstract code.
For a long time I have felt that Haskell represented the most mathematical language. Julia really shows that there are other ways of building a mathematical language with taste and style. It's oriented to practitioners and applied math folks rather than computer scientists and pure mathematicians. I have enjoyed seeing the differences between these systems quite a bit, and I think Julia has a bright future as a practical, daily-use system for science.
I have often felt that there are many discontinuities between "pretty" Haskell as it is taught and pragmatic Haskell. I haven't used Julia enough in anger to say it for sure, but I see in the way it works great potential for the pragmatic code to be as beautiful as the high-level and abstract code.
For a long time I have felt that Haskell represented the most mathematical language. Julia really shows that there are other ways of building a mathematical language with taste and style. It's oriented to practitioners and applied math folks rather than computer scientists and pure mathematicians. I have enjoyed seeing the differences between these systems quite a bit, and I think Julia has a bright future as a practical, daily-use system for science.