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Perhaps that is part of the point of the article? If you accept things like @inbounds, which is a horrible hack and was a horrible hack five years ago, then perhaps the culture is a little too tolerant towards horrible hacks. Because many of the bugs the author enumerates are of the "fixes the problem for now, let's deal with the consequences later" type.

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I wouldn't say that @inbounds is a "horrible hack". Just like the `unsafe` part of Rust is not a "horrible hack". There are cases where it is impossible for a compiler to statically verify that an index access is in bounds and in those cases it will need to emit a check and an exception. This prevents many other optimizations (for example SIMD). So for a language that is intended for people to write low-level numerical routines there has to be a way to opt out of these checks or people would have to write their numerical routines in a completely different language. But the important part is that index access is memory safe by default (as opposed to e.g. C) and you can also force boundschecking to be turned on (to override @inbounds) with a command-line flag (--check-bounds=yes). So if you want, you could pretend "@inbounds" doesn't exist by just aliasing your julia executable to apply that command line flag.

Yes and no... Julia's been focused on high performance numerical computing from the beginning (and other related scientific applications). Using macros to get good performance from relatively generic code was (from my outside perspective) a really effective way to support real applications early on and also give time for the compiler to get "sufficiently smart" to make the macros less necessary.

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