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It feels like Julia would have side-stepped a lot of grumbling if it hadn't made its central pitch 'performance'. From time-to-plot to type instability and GC issues, lots of reasonable performance gripes have been amplified because we were sold that everything would be 'blazingly fast'.

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On the other hand, performance really was, and remains, one of the main reasons to message from Python to Julia. Absent performance, why would a Pythonista migrate to Julia?

A lot of the design decisions seem to prioritize expressiveness over performance, with the type system and multiple dispatch etc. If they wanted a performant python, they wouldn't have made those choices. So clearly they think Julia is good in other ways, but it didn't make the marketing pitch, which tended to be just 'performant python'.

Now Mojo's going to come along and probably fill that niche, which might at the very least force Julia's community to focus a bit more on its other advantages.

I would still think that multiple dispatch is a better way to build libraries than OOP, but indeed I agree that wouldn't be enough for something as drastic as changing language.

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