I used to be a pretty competent C++ programmer. I am no longer that. While it was fun to spend entire weeks talking to labmates about how to micro-optimize some bitsets or other obscure code, I enjoy even more just doing using SomeLibrary and making things faster.
What do we have? I suggest you look around, Julia has a lot. A small list for you to ponder.
- https://turinglang.org/: easily best in class for probabilistic programming, I’ve used Stan, WinBUGS, PyMC3 before and Turing is by far the most pleasant
- https://jump.dev/: absolutely fantastic environment for mathematical programming
- https://sciml.ai/: really, does anything more need to be said about SciML? fantastic ecosystem
- https://www.algebraicjulia.org/: category theory in Julia, even a non-mathematician like myself made some contributions
- A commercial game dev environment (you seem quite interested in game dev) I'm creating the world's first commercial game written in Julia!
I have no idea what is a power user or “top 1% of programmers”. That doesn’t seem like a healthy way to think about adoption. I see university classes and labs adopt Julia and that tells me enough, that the next generation of programmers and scientists will be using it, and that’s good enough for me.