That's a great news! I search for a new general use (for me) language. I come from C++ and C land. I don't like Python for bigger projects, because of it's typing regime, performance and white space significance. So far Julia seems nice and improvement in tooling is always welcome, because tooling is crucial for the language survival.
A side question: How is Julia for web development? I'm not really a web developer and my mindset is more in realms of C, shell and CGI or Go. I mean a small to mid scale operation so SQLite integration is probably enough and Julia has a package for that.
Julia has a web framework called Genie (https://github.com/essenciary/Genie.jl) which seems decent enough (probably useful for data visualizations but I don't know of many people using it (I haven't used it for anything worth mentioning)
One of the neatest things I found when I was messing around with Julia was UnicodePlots, which lets you make nice plots right in the terminal. I love that little library and used it to build a little live orderbook of GDAX right in the terminal. I wish there were more terminal-based applications for non-sysadmin/engineering tasks, I feel like its such a useful medium.
Certainly not as mature as most languages that focus on web (since it was not the priority), but it shouldn't be hard to create simple services. For example with:
Julia's main focus is on scientific computing. Basically think of it as a Matlab or Python + Numpy or even a C++ replacement for numeric computing.
A lot of the libraries are focused on optimization, differential equations, statistics, matrix operations...those sorts of things. It doesn't have classes in the way you would probably think (not really an OO language).
Go and C do not have classes either. If it's a bit comparable it would be a plus for me. I'm mainly a C++ programmer by trade by I don't enjoy it and in my free time I use mainly C with some shell glue and some Go.
I read that their focus is on scientific computing, but I feel that there is a growing effort to expand Julia's use cases. Also I think that some end user applications could gain a bit from optimized statistics or matrix operations.
As far as the language goes, Julia is absolutely awesome for general purpose work, including web development, scripting, glue language, etc.
The associated libraries are, unfortunately but understandably, less well developed than counterparts in other languages. E.g. right now I'm happily using AWS[Core/SQS/S3], which are highly functional community developed AWS packages, but they're definitely less full featured than boto3. My impression is this situation is common for a variety of web and database packages.
Ah, yea if you're ok with that then great. I like it myself. A lot of folks are dismayed by that though. I find that the language itself has the ease of Python with the performance of a language with static (or is it strong?) types, JIT, and a design focused on performance. The REPL functionality and package manager are pretty good too.
I'm not sure if you're suggesting that an "OO language" is a better match for web development, but in case you love some of the OO features like inheritance of fields, you can check out https://github.com/rjplevin/Classes.jl
Polymorphism yes, but there is no class structure to combine state and behavior. I suppose OO is pretty subjective and I should say most folks wouldn't consider Julia to be OO in nature.
I respect your lisp skills, but isn't what you're saying that "sure a tank can fly...you just need really big wings and and a giant rocket engine strapped on the back"? I'll agree that you can hack on your own object system, but aren't you essentially towing a yacht with a Honda Fit? Or do I misunderstand?
In addition to this. About Python and typing, have you tried mypy (statically typed Python)? I find the typing story quite decent since Python 3.6. I use it on every project that goes above ~1000 LOC.
A side question: How is Julia for web development? I'm not really a web developer and my mindset is more in realms of C, shell and CGI or Go. I mean a small to mid scale operation so SQLite integration is probably enough and Julia has a package for that.