Well, this is exactly what I was talking about! There was a long thread where it was explained that multiple dispatch is a way to solve expression problem. At the same time, expression problem is a general problem of programming, which has absolutely zero connection to scientific computing. Of course, there are scientific computing problem which can be easier solved in multiple dispatch paradigm, but you can say the same of all other fields of programming! But still, for some (weird for me) reason, Julia and multiple dispatch is still marketed as a “good fit for mathematical programming”. To be honest, I wouldn’t mind to use any other language, which has multiple dispatch as it’s central feature, even if it’ll be something Go/Rust-like.
Regarding other points, in my world (which is of course can differ from other points of view), serious programming do not mean small bash/python scripts, it’s a multiple middle/backend servers, which should work with multiple concurrent users, so time to first plot is non-existent. At the same time high performance is highly needed, because each extra millisecond of calculations is multiplied by the number of requests and in the end it transforms to extra costs when you need to buy additional servers. In this regard high performance is not something purely scientific programming related.
Now, Julia gives this unique ability to have variable performance, i.e. when you can choose whether your code should be short or when you need to get all extra speed. Consider for example, that you have dataframe where one of the column has date type and you need to pivot this table over months. If it is not critical, you can use usual stack/unstack commands, but if performance is needed you can take into account fact that there are only 12 months in a year and write very performant implementation of such a pivot. This is something which just do not exist in other languages: R/python do not give this level of control and in C it will be so complicated.
So, I’ll reiterate, Julia has features (multiple dispatch, variable performance) which is unique and can give it an edge over other languages, but since all of those features are marketed as scientific, it evolve very slow in other fields of programming.