I’m not sure I agree with this. Academia is good, but it’s not sustainable. Academics usually end up in the real world and face a lot of institutional pressure from whoever employs them next to use more “traditional” tools like R, Python, or Matlab.
One of the big problems I observe with Julia right now is that most of the regular users are academics. These people have lots of free time and the ability to dictate their own tools, but they are also small islands – they don’t manage that many people, and can’t enforce Julia use. Their long-term effect (I think) is probably fairly small.
Something we could be better at is encouraging commercial use. Commercial use is a massive boon for programming languages. People use Python because it works, it covers all the bases, and employers want to pay people who can write Python. Julia doesn’t have the same thing! We use Julia because we love the language and think its a better tool, but few of us are under the impression that someone would pay us for our Julia skills.
I’m not sure how to encourage this. I know Julia Computing has been doing some excellent work to onboard people, but there’s still not many places where I can say “ABC Corp? Oh yeah, I heard they were a Julia shop!”
The more commercial adoption we can push for the better. I have no idea how, but I think that’s a good goal to consider.
An additional goal is more education and outreach. At some point the Julia evangelists got quiet and stopped pushing. I include myself as someone who did this. I want to see more good-quality blog posts, more neat projects, more talks, more meetups, etc. Things are not as unified as they once were and I think we could do a little more in representing a vibrant community to the world.