"At present, Julia is a/an ________ programming language. " Fill in the blank with the most appropriate adjective.
For example, (some possible options)
popular?
burgeoning?
mainstream?
non-mainstream?
unusual?
ordinary?
…
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At present, Julia is an incomparable programming language.
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At present, Julia is a sweetspot programming languge.
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What’s the purpose of this? That’ll really affect what adjective goes there, assuming one adjective can even do the job.
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amazing 
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Suppose our purpose is to provide a general introduction and recommendation of the Julia language to a person.
Nobody advertised julia to me. I realized the language via JuMP, which was adopted in a paper written by a German researcher published in Mathematical Programming, when I was studying related knowledge two years ago. And from then on, I learnt about julia.
So I think doing applications with julia should be more effectual than advertising the language on its own. People may want to try using julia naturally when they are surrounded by julia users.
PS
And now I have a chance to infect others since I’ve just sumbitted a paper—where simulations were done with JuMP—to some press. (Not certain it can pass the review but, whatever, I do things I think to be meaningful.)
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fun
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As a person, I would ignore a one-liner like this.
Every language has its proponents, and they usually tell you that their language is the most ____. Joining this chorus is mostly pointless.
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I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to include this question in the annual questionnaire and publish a word cloud with the answers on the Julia website.
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intuitive, powerful, straightforward, beautiful
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I agree with your point of view.
However, what if we merely aim to make an objective statement, such as in the following context, which adjective would you choose:
“This project is developed based on Julia, a/an ____ programming language.”
That will not be true, unless you forked Julia. 
That said, I would just mention that some project was written in Julia and leave it at that.
When Julia 0.3–0.4 came out, only the early adopter nerds knew about it and one would get into lengthy explanations about AOT and multiple dispatch, until the listener’s eyes glazed over.
Around 0.7, everyone in my field at least heard about Julia and maybe tried it out.
Now we are at 1.12. People who don’t know an adjective’s worth about Julia already probably don’t care what language the project was written in. In some contexts I would mention “open source”, if that matters.
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Can such a statement ever be objective? Any adjective you put in will make the statement subjective:
- “a new programming language”? “New” is subjective.
- “Fast”? Subjective again, also time-to-first plot arguably makes Julia feel slow. Anyway, “arguably” is subjective too.
- “Good/amazing” and other praise? Clearly subjective.
- “Slow/bloated” and otherwise “bad”? Equally subjective.
My two cents:
not-popular-enough
That’s technically one word, I guess…
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The latest version of the manual says that:
Julia is a flexible dynamic programming language, appropriate for scientific and numerical computing, with performance comparable to traditional statically-typed languages.
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This project is developed in Julia, the best programming language given the project’s goals, time constraints, and our team’s expertise.
More concrete statement: this project requires both interactive development and writing custom fast code, and we chose not to split the team into Python/R/MATLAB programmers and C/C++/Rust programmers, as Julia is the best solution to the two-language problem in our situation.
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At present, Julia is a flexible programming language.
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At present, Julia is an effective programming language.
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No offense to anybody who chimed in, but incomparable, sweetspot, amazing, fun, intuitive, powerful, straightforward, beautiful, not-popular-enough, flexible, effective, etc are so vague and subjective, the only thing I would take away is that the author is padding a word count and wasting my time. The sentence fundamentally does not make room for explaining the merits of the language or why the author is using it, and crowdsourcing won’t answer the latter.
Even if we get a decent summary justifying Julia’s existence, there’s still a good chance I’d still see it as padding. If I’m already using a language, I don’t need to hear it. If the project is why I’m there, I expect to read more about the project, not a justification for every dependency.
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This question deserves to be taken seriously, because anyone who doesn’t know Julia will eventually ask it.
What should we, as a community, say?
I remember when I first discovered Julia: I used to say it was an excellent general-purpose language that could be used for almost anything—except real-time tasks, embedded systems, low-level hardware control, or workflows where using an interpreter is still more convenient than a JIT (for now).
Let’s see what its creators wrote back in 2012: Why We Created Julia
I see that Julia has become a shining promise for data science, AI, scientific computing, and engineering—but I also clearly see Julia as useful for everyone, from kids to PhDs.
Julia needs more general-purpose packages (web, GUI, hobbies, home automation, etc.) because it can be not only the solution to the “two-language problem” in highly demanding contexts, but also a solution to “almost all problems,” from school to college, from home to industry.
Let’s simply stop telling people that Julia is a niche language. I’m pretty sure it can become the “Python on steroids” some people like to call it (although that comparison is unfair—Python could never handle GPUs, multithreading, or distributed systems the way Julia does).
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