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I keep on messing around with Julia, but I never stick with it. I have nothing in particular against the language, but I don't do a lot of scientific computing, so my motivations to use it are not that great.

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I think Julia gets unfairly pigeonholed. It's got a great concurrency story, for example. I know what you mean though, it always seems to be the language I'll write my "next" project in.

Why can't it be used for general computing?

It can. However, Julia made a very strong push to target the scientific computing niche (very strong array support, ease of writing tight loops in native code, etc) - and such it has a very quickly growing ecosystem of high quality scientific packages.

In comparison, Julia has relatively few web frameworks, GUI toolkits, etc..

Sure it can. But why would I pick it up over, say, rust? Rust gives me the productivity of a dynamic language, and the speed of a systems language. Julia gives the same. So, given similar pros/cons, the choice comes down to aethsetics, and Julia just didn't give me a compelling enough reason to switch.

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