But, honestly, I think their adoption at this point is less "linux-like" driven and much more "apple-like". In that, the language is 'ok', but the company is going to INCREDIBLE lengths with respect to shrewd marketing and buzz-creation at this point.
Which is admirable but also kinda worrying at the same time.
Kotlin was 2011, and is JetBrains. JetBrain's is 1500 people. So big, but not giant.
Rust is 2013 Mozilla is only 750 people
So perhaps Major Tech Giant is over-stating it. But definately most other things in the last decade have a major established tech firm backing it.
Julia has basically nothing. Starting out as a MIT project, and then Julia Computing is a tiny startup; with like what 50 people now?
I've seen a shift in the winds, that's all I'm saying. I wasn't mean to come off so negative. (certainly not as negative as Chris took it!)
Nowadays, I find new Julia stories and posts when they show up on HN (as opposed to a few years ago when all you had to do was follow juliabloggers).
PS. One forgets people like Stefan and Jeff are likely to be on HN. Apologies. I'd have been a bit more careful in my choice of words otherwise.
The buzz you see is almost all from people who switched from other languages and found that Julia was a gigantic breath of fresh air. I can say that for me, it completely changed my attitude towards programming in general. Before, programming was something I did sometimes as part of my physics research. Now, it’s also my hobby that I probably spend too much time on.
It’s hard not to get a little evangelical when you go through a change like this.
Seriously, when I learned Python (about 20 years ago) I thought it was amazing, and it was, because it let me do things I wouldn't have otherwise done (by reducing the cognitive load on the programming side so I could think more about my problem than the code).
Julia's giving me that kick again - more expressive than Python, doesn't just glue things together but integrates them, and can make code as fast as any language.