Do you see a contradiction between having a good design and having a specific purpose?

Yes. I think good programming language design is necessarily general, and the best way to achieve that is with a language that's been validated in widely varied domains. Certainly my experience is that specialized languages are consistently worse than general-purpose ones.

Julia is general-purpose, but there is a deliberate orientation towards scientific computing. That's a partly non-technical choice about what is going to be optimized in priority.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17433435/what-makes-juli...