From what I can see Julia has a lot of academic institutions behind it. Take a look at the contributors and you will see lots of mention of MIT and Harvard. I may be wrong but I am assuming that those institutions are sponsoring the development of Julia. Nim has no such support from anyone!
I'd say that the academic institutions may be paying some of these people to develop Julia.
As far as I know, Andreas Rumpf does not work for MIT or any academic institution if that's what you're implying. It is rather curious that the MIT website has a copy of Nim's documentation.
I'm not really implying that. Somewhere or other it says Andreas is working for a top secret startup and is always trying to start his own.
What I'm saying is that it can be misleading how much academic institutions are "behind" academic projects. If you talk to most academics, you'll discover that they believe their academic institutions are doing everything they can to discourage their projects (academics can be somewhat sarcastic).
Some of the Julia core devs are academics and write papers on Julia, yes. Their salaries are paid by those institutions. They may have students who can do some coding for them (so long as they write a thesis too). But being an academic is a very demanding lifestyle. With few exceptions, you are paid to write papers, teach, do administration and apply for grants, not to write code.
