Personally, I had little experience in serious programming prior to Julia. I had used R/MATLAB/Python heavily but I never really felt I had a deeper understanding of what’s under the hood and thought all this is too hard for the uninitiated. 9 months into Julia, I can talk about and answer questions on parametric types, multiple dispatch, inplace operations and how to debug inefficiently written code (and, even have little intuitive understanding of what native code might look like for something I am coding). I think the ability for a newbie to pickup and become decent at Julia in a short span of time is an underrated aspect of the programming language. The other great aspect is that there are only a few tricks you need to master to go from beginner to being good at Julia: avoid non-constant globals, focus on inplace operations, write for-loops and try best to minimize type-instabilities. Just these few things will make your code speed up relative to most languages and you’ll begin to appreciate how good of a language Julia really is!
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