While I don't think this piece was well argued I must agreee with the sentiment that Julia is somewhat of a disappointment, at least for me personally. Last year I started learning Rust and wanted to use it instead of C++ in the future. I since have programmed quite a lot in it, contributed to open source software and absolutely have fallen in love with it.

So this year I wanted to replace my default scripting language (Python) with Julia and potentially use it for my simulations or ML in the future. But every time I take a stab at Julia - last time around the release of version 1 - it never really stops feeling foreign. Everything is slightly unintuitive and weird. Also, learning Julia made me realize how amazing Rust's learning resources are. Besides the official book and the API docs (with an amazing template), there are a lot of great third party and actively maintained resources likes cheats.rs. I never felt Rust was unituitive or hard to learn. Even if some concepts are unique, the resources do a great job of introducing them to you. While Julia's learning website lists an exercism course, its manual and a bunch of video lectures.

I think selling Julia as a Python competitor raises wrong expectations. Julia may look easy or Python-like but is far more difficult to use IMHO. They may be similar in terms of applications but at least in how they feel to use, they are very different.

I still haven't given up but whereas I speak very highly and enthusiastically of Rust and recommend it everywhere (yes I am one of those people), I cannot see myself doing the same for Julia in the future.

Ps.: I wish there was a book club-like way of learning programming languages and discussing progress with friends. That would make learning even more fun.