I know I tend to be a little controversial but here’s my thoughts. Basically I think you are both right and wrong for different reasons. Hope you all are learning to see my criticism as just opinionated honesty - if not, you can’t please everybody :).
I think Julia is making it’s way toward it’s goal, it’ll be pretty slow for a while, but it’ll end up having a reasonable share of users doing ML. Julia is awesome for those niche things like @machineko is talking about - but that’s part of the “problem”. Those things make great blog posts, but, it’s so experimental the syntax/examples outside the docs basically change every few weeks to the point where - really only the people developing the libraries can use it. I really feel for anyone trying to do those things in production as an outsider, or trying to learn the language. The language is really easy, but, I’ve seen new comers get frustrated by 2 months out of date examples.
I think there’s a cultural hurdle. The reality is most users of other languages aren’t developers of that language or it’s low level API’s. The marketshare of developers in my opinion isn’t “use a language to fix it”, people will do that, but usually only because they have too. Julia has taken the “get more grad students” approach, which is good, it’s free labor, but at some point we need more production users. To do that, we need more things to be at that point. It’ll happen as soon as more researchers realize that there’s more acclaim in production grade tools than in arxiv papers.
I’m of the opinion that, we actually have enough people to flesh out the ecosystem, making stable libraries, etc. But, the focus isn’t on doing that. Someone a year ago or so was asking people to “reach 1.0” but I think what they meant was “why is a lot of the ecosystem a bed of sand outside of base Julia and a few core libraries?”.
Look there are dozens of examples of contributors doing this. Some really solid stuff. Yes I am guilty of the argument I am making too. Most people in industry are looking for the 80-20 they, are typically risk conservative because risk correlates to $$$. Jumping into using tools that aren’t stable, takes some courage and careful planning. The alternative - tends to be considerably easier. Rule of thumb is - people are lazy unless they are bored, and something needs to be 10x better before more people will even go beyond a 1st page google search.