Well, it's agreeing that Julia's goals (promises? aspirations?) are worthwhile. Whether Julia itself actually delivers on those promises is a different question that isn't addressed in the original post.

I like what Julia is doing but I just dislike the syntax. It seems to resemble ruby, whose syntax I also think is ugly, which to me resembles a modern form of basic.

Hmmm... this seems to be an odd first impression.

There is the use of @ (but to signal macros), but otherwise, the syntax is much closer to a cross between Python and matlab except nicer for doing math.

I tried writing a few programs in Julia and got sucked in by how effective it is. The real surprise is that just a few weeks in instead of pulling up R to do a quick calculation my fingers decided they wanted Julia.

Similar story for me. I did last years Advent of code in Julia and it was great.

Personally, I think when you write Julia in shorthand form, it looks nothing like ruby or basic.

for example, check out parts of the stdlib: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/base/operator...

but in the end, julia really is a lisp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK3zRXhrFZY

I know what you mean. I especially dislike the use of an "end" keyword everywhere without a corresponding "begin" keyword.

Does it really matter though? I mean, whether it's a closing bracket or a whitespace demarcated control flow - does it really effect anything you do in the language? Julia solves a lot of problems, like real problems - quibbling over begin/end vs {/} or white space seems kinda silly.

Meanwhile I have actually seen real world lost productivity due to white space in python. Curly brackets not so much. Never seen lost productivity over begin/end but I'm sure it's happened. It seems silly to me either way - it doesn't really effect anything.

I think that's inherited from matlab.

Huh okay. I’ve never used Matlab but one of the first languages I played with was a basic for simple game development

begin is a Julia keyword though it.

But yes end closes begin, for, function and while.

Yeah that’s exactly what I’m talking about

You can apply to a job here,

https://juliacomputing.com/case-studies/

The ecosystem is a superset of Pythons: https://github.com/JuliaPy/PyCall.jl

It's probably more fair to claim that R/Python/Julia have the same ecosystem now if you are willing to deal with speed bumps and some clunky interfaces. Because there are packages going in both direction for all three.