I'll agree on several counts (as a physicist too!):
* Rust's tooling lets you have a base-floor of what is acceptable code that is much more palatable than non-top tier Julia codes. There's a world of difference opening a random crate's code in Rust that has been linted/clippy'd/check'd by the compiler rather than a random Julia package that a coworker/colleague just fired up. This tooling is getting better and better in Julia and I'd be interested to hear which Julia projects you worked on were really hampered by TTFX and refactoring woes. Hard agree on the footguns - I want the VSCode plugin to be better at detecting dead code, it cost me weeks on a project lately.
* I'm also excited for some notion of interfaces to come to Julia. Perhaps it will be a 2.0 thing, but there's still lots of design stuff to figure out.
* We have different understandings of "productive" for different focii then - I still find it painful to do the equivalent of `rand(1:10, (20, 20))` in Rust and I can get STEM people to be productive with Julia before you can even finishing saying "borrowchecker".
* Rust's tooling lets you have a base-floor of what is acceptable code that is much more palatable than non-top tier Julia codes. There's a world of difference opening a random crate's code in Rust that has been linted/clippy'd/check'd by the compiler rather than a random Julia package that a coworker/colleague just fired up. This tooling is getting better and better in Julia and I'd be interested to hear which Julia projects you worked on were really hampered by TTFX and refactoring woes. Hard agree on the footguns - I want the VSCode plugin to be better at detecting dead code, it cost me weeks on a project lately.
* I'm also excited for some notion of interfaces to come to Julia. Perhaps it will be a 2.0 thing, but there's still lots of design stuff to figure out.
* We have different understandings of "productive" for different focii then - I still find it painful to do the equivalent of `rand(1:10, (20, 20))` in Rust and I can get STEM people to be productive with Julia before you can even finishing saying "borrowchecker".