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Which role? A general purpose programming language with an emphasis on readability?

Yes...but one that is also very fast, portable and with great generic programming.

Stuff like Numba greatly decreases the need for Julia.

C++17 also feels surprisingly dynamic, and together with Cython for easy Python-C++ interop also decreases the need for Julia.

And reports from the Julia world are not exactly encouraging - http://danluu.com/julialang/

That report is over a year old, which for a 4 year old language is a very long time. The top comment in [1] is from a week ago and highlights why it is now mostly invalid.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11070764

I had never considered Julia as a general purpose language. I assumed it was targetted mainly at data science etc.

The core language is general purpose, and IMO really good for high-performance work, but the community is focused on numerical code, so there aren't a lot of libraries for non-numerical/scientific/financial work at this point in time.

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