There is a tension between usability/concision and consistency/purity (think matlab vs scheme); I feel that the balance has shifted towards the latter in several decisions, as Julia distances itself from being a language for technical computing.
I think (and hope) this shift is also largely due to the non-breaking constraint of the 1.0 era. In my view, the mindset was to better make things clean and precise for 1.0, even at the expense of verbosity. There were a lot of “we can decide/add that later” statements since adding convenience functionality typically isn’t breaking. Therefore I have hope that we’ll get (back) convenience methods in the future.
dropdims(sum(a,dims=1),dims=1)
Yeah, I also have a bunch of those overly verbose expressions (dims occurs three times!) in my code as well now.