That is just depressing. One of the best things about Julia so far has been that it seems to have the philosophy “do the right thing, everything else be damned” and I sincerely hope it continues this way. If Julia fails as a language as a result of that, then come what may. At that point it’ll be time for me to give up on society and become an island-dwelling hermit.
Lots of other languages in the past have followed the philosophy “attract users, advertise to ‘non-programmers’, the right thing be damned” and they are horrible. In particular I’m thinking of COBOL, PHP and JavaScript. The first of these was unsuccessful, and the second is probably on its way out, the third will be the doom of us all. So 2/3’s of these examples perhaps give us a glimmer of hope.
On a less grandiose note, I also fail to see in what sense nothing “isempty”. I’m not even convinced that most people would expect the result to be false, even the aforementioned Mongol hordes.