I appreciate the link to the prior discussion, @stevengj – as someone relatively new to Julia (but old to software engineering), as well, it’s hard not to wonder about this, so the discussions are informative. In particular in that prior thread, there were two points that stood out to me – the first response:
Make the community and language more friendly to non-scientific software engineers.
and this:
If I could suggest where this discussion goes from here, what are you yourself doing so Julia can win big?
Couldn’t agree more. We (the community) need to continue to make it more compelling for scientists and engineers, while also recognizing Julia’s potential as a general-purpose language beyond science and engineering. So, why not be the next Visual Basic? (Hey, don’t groan… many of us started there, and there’s an opening for a worthy successor… note this link is from Retool, makers of internal tools, like you might have historically made with VB. What about internal tools for scientists and engineers? Or both…).