function julia_blues(bummers...)
The stupidest, (stupidest in the sense that I really wish they didn't bother me, because they're silly things!), things that bother me are:
1. The 'end' keyword. It's everywhere! Loops, if-else statements, function bodies. I mean I understand why it's helpful for parsing and providing more info to the compiler, but honestly, I would've rather we just stuck with curly braces '{}'! At least it's fewer characters to type and it just feels less crowded on screen while reading. It feels like such a petty complaint, but honestly, it feels like I'm writing Pascal or Matlab all over again. Which leads me to my second point.
2. The default choice of 1 based indexing. I'm not going to go into it, because plenty of people before me have beat this dead horse already[1][2][3], but I can't help but be saddened by this choice and its implications. It's important to acknowledge the fact that Julia started as a competitor to Matlab and Octav, so it makes sense from that perspective. However, it could have been a much more general purpose language, with huge performance benefits over popular interpreted languages like Python, JS, and Ruby. It could have been a unifying force in the scientific computing community, bridging the gap between R and Python users with a greenfield approach that would have been a force to be reckoned with. Instead, rightly or not, it's viewed largely as 'just' a matlab replacement.
Now, regardless of whether 1 or 0 based indexing is truly 'better' or the 'end' keyword is no big deal, the reality is that there's a huge demographic of potential users that won't buy into Julia, because it doesn't quite feel as ergonomic as Python/JS/Ruby and won't take it seriously as a general purpose language, because it looks/feels like Matlab and they only use 'real' programming languages. Again, I'm not saying this is right, but it is the reality we're faced with and it just feels like a huge missed opportunity and bums me out.
end