Why is Julia so great?

There are many things that can may be more or less important depending on the personal experience of each one. So for a general audience I tend to show things like:

  • achievable performance, of course
  • package management
  • integration with documentation (help entries and Documenter.jl)
  • simplicity of creating, distributing and registering packages
  • syntax
  • REPL and its features (Pkg and Shell integration), and notebooks
  • domain-specific ecosystem: differential equations, non-linear programming, SciML
  • plottting etc within the same environment

Each of these things may be available in other languages, but I don’t see any other combining all these features so well.

Then you can go for more language-specific features (multiple dispatch, composability, etc) but IMHO this is harder to understand from a utilitarian viewpoint from start.

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