> "That said, it isn’t for everyone. Bezanson says it’s not exactly ideal for building desktop applications or operating systems, and though you can use it for web programming, it’s better suited to technical computing.".
So what is it? Is this the supposed "One true language", or is it just another language with a narrow scientific focus?
I'm not a core developer on Julia, just a user and package creator. It is geared towards technical/scientific computing, and excels in that task - it has replaced the combination of Python and C++ I used previously. I think what Jeff Bezanson is saying is that there is nothing intrinsically unsuited about Julia for doing web programming or desktop applications. It benefits from a fresh start in this respect, and also by using best-of-breed libraries from OpenBLAS to libuv. This is in contrast to other languages for technical computing like MATLAB or R which I wouldn't consider to be practical choices for making, for example, a math-as-a-service application (although R is getting into this territory with things like shiny).