Libraries? Sure. Ease of development, I cannot comment on.<p>But measuring performance with timing a &quot;hello world&quot; program? Seriously? What scenario does the author have in mind that makes this particular benchmark even remotely relevant?<p>The rest of the rant pretty much comes down to &quot;it doesn&#x27;t look like Python&quot; (which is IMO a good thing, and I would certainly not call Python a &quot;de facto standard of numerical computing&quot; -- sure, it&#x27;s there, but I still see a lot more of R and Matlab -- and note how both have 1-based indexes.)<p>To be fair, last time I checked, Julia definitely had some catching up to do in a few areas to become a real competitor to those two, but &quot;hello world&quot; benchmarks would not be among these.<p>It&#x27;s been a little while though, and I am tempted to check again -- leaving libraries alone for the moment, does vectorization still result in a lot of performance loss compared to loops?