I partly agree, but I think it is a bit more to it than that. Part of what made Perl, Python and Ruby so widely used compared to say LISP or Matlab is that they are great at text manipulation and interacting with the unix shell.
Julia is exactly the same. Anything people would use to write shell scripts, I would use Julia with instead and I have used many languages for this purpose: Python, Ruby and Go. Out of al these I find Julia to be the best language.
The fact that Julia is free, open source, available on all platforms and is good at text and shell stuff means it has a sort of Trojan horse ability to get into more wide usage.
I am not a scientific programmer, yet I use Julia for a whole bunch of stuff and find it very productive. Here are some examples of stuff I have written in Julia:
- Custom scripts for Swift and Objective-C app compilations.
- Various file conversion utilities.
- Code generators based on custom DSLs. Due to Julia's
support for macros writing a DSL is easier in Julia than in Python, Go or whatever "script" alternative I might have used.
- Various parsers. I find Julia very good at writing parsers. I have used this to create tools for manipulating user interface definition files for a larger C++ project.
- Editor plugins. I have written plugins in Julia for e.g. TextMate although I guess it would have worked on Sublime and other editors as well.
I cannot imagine anyone would have had a nice experience writing any of this stuff in R or Matlab.
Julia may never get big as a Web programming language, but for scientific programming, data science, data scraping/munging/preparation, scripting make up quite a large field together.
Julia may have some slow startup due to JITing but I found my Julia scripts to run much faster than the shell scripts they replaced and the Julia code was easier to read and faster to write.