When @mit.edelman and @jeff.bezanson told me back in 2011 that they were developing a new programming language, my initial reaction was “You’re doomed.” New programming languages, especially ones without a large corporate backer (Swift, Go, C#, …) rarely succeed because of precisely such network effects.
Over time, I upgraded my prognosis to “probably doomed” and “maybe still doomed” … but in the meantime I started having fun with it, and I found its unique combination of features made it more productive for me than other languages for many of my projects. As long as that holds true for sufficiently many people, Julia will continue to grow, but overtaking established languages is never something you can count on.
YMMV — a more mainstream language like Python has been around 3x as long and probably has > 1000x the funding and number of developers, so for the foreseeable future there will be domains in which it has more mature libraries, and the hassle of inter-language calls may not be worth it if you’re not writing any critical code in Julia. Or maybe you prefer static languages like Rust or C++, your other car is a cdr, or you are a big fan of APL and the conciseness of J. No judgement — everyone’s needs and tastes are different, and there a lot of fun languages to choose from.
(Unfortunately, it looks like this thread is headed for yet another unending collection of unrelated gripes, meta-gripes about the reactions to gripes, and heroically doomed attempts to raise the tone that fail because there is no specific actionable topic on which to focus, that festers for a few weeks until @mbauman mercifully closes the thread.)