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Comment by ms013 | Hacker News Reader

The same reasons people migrated to Python in the late 90s from matlab, Fortran and C++: Python addressed pain points in those languages and ecosystems. Julia addresses deficiencies in Python the language. Unfortunately, it lacks the ecosystem: until it gets the rich library set that Python has, we're stuck with Python since ecosystem is arguably more important for practical traction than the base language.

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I don't know how well it works, but Julia does let you use python libraries.

    @pyimport matplotlib.pyplot as plt
    x = linspace(0,2*pi,1000); y = sin(3*x + 4*cos(2*x));
    plt.plot(x, y, color="red", linewidth=2.0, linestyle="--")
    plt.show()

https://github.com/JuliaPy/PyCall.jl

Works really well and a lot of python scientific software is part of a typical julia install.

Glad to hear that. Will it be possible to overload . in the future?

There's been extensive discussion of that and yes, it may well happen [1]. The biggest concern at this point is how to avoid having people abuse such a feature by trying to fake out class-based o.o. code in Julia in a way that will look right but work poorly.

[1] https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/1974

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