As a data scientist, I’m constantly disappointed that Julia didn’t take off the way I was hoping (and thought) that it would when I was doing some combination of machine learning and HPC as a grad student back in 2013.
It was just so pleasant and enjoyable to program in, and there were many things I was able to do with the language that would have been much more difficult in other languages (as one example, I wrote a generated function to compute the irreducible matrix representations of compact groups; Julia generated a unique function with optimized bytecode for each distinct matrix dimension).
Like the post author, I also found Julia easy to use as a general purpose programming language. I’m still hoping adoption will gain momentum at some point. Python certainly took a while to get going.
It was just so pleasant and enjoyable to program in, and there were many things I was able to do with the language that would have been much more difficult in other languages (as one example, I wrote a generated function to compute the irreducible matrix representations of compact groups; Julia generated a unique function with optimized bytecode for each distinct matrix dimension).
Like the post author, I also found Julia easy to use as a general purpose programming language. I’m still hoping adoption will gain momentum at some point. Python certainly took a while to get going.