Why we created Julia - new language for fresh approach to technical computing
I wonder what they think about or have learned from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_(programming_language) , another recent-ish attempt to deliver a modern and powerful scientific programming language.Personally I'm a little wary of being ghettoised into something overly domain-specific for scientific/numerical computing. Really good interop may mitigate that -- something which can navigate the unholy mix of C, C++, fortran, matlab, octave, R and python routines one comes across trying to reproduce others research work, would indeed be awesome.I do wonder if some of the noble demands of this project might be better delegated to library developers though, after adding a bare minimum of syntax and feature support to a powerful general-purpose language. For now Python+numpy+scipy seems a great 90% solution here.