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Comment by random_moonwalk | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how important more superficial elements will be in terms of future adoption. As a Python programmer Swift looks much more familiar and if you can easily import familiar packages from Python then maybe this will help overcome the inertia required to switch, especially in industry.

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Even if Swift wins over Julia it certainly won't be because of these two points (syntax and Python interop). Julia probably has the best Python interop out of any other language and the syntax is fairly simple (although a bit ugly with the 'end' blocks and the allowed unicode characters).

'end' is subjective (I like it). The unicode characters allow to write syntax which is very close to mathematical formulae, this can help a lot with reading/understanding in some situations.

One of the things that people in my field (physics) love when I showcase Julia is the ability to use greek letters as variables: this makes mathematical formulae so clean to read!

Don't you dare talk shit about my Unicode characters. Any langauge written after Unicode's adoption has no excuse not to use them. They're wonderful. They're magical. They let you say exactly what you mean, and keep it condensed enought that you can read it at a glance.

If you're in a field where symbols have existing meanings, it's asinine to make your code clunky and harder to read by not using those existing meanings.

Looks, or is similar to use?

Python is my main language, and I struggled mightily to get my head around some aspects of Swift (e.g. randomly sticking question marks in different places until it was happy). As an aside, I also found the API incredibly verbose, the documentation poor, and Xcode to be a bad IDE.

In contrast, I enjoyed Julia - while the documentation isn't great either, after a single afternoon of learning (with plenty of Googling) I was able to port code over from Python and have it run perfectly.

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