Julia seems like it's meant to be friendly to people who know MATLAB, Python, and R (even Fortran). R and Python are really comfortable with working with data science and that's what Julia is geared toward. I have no experience with MATLAB, though. Julia's programming "world" may indeed be a different programming world than C programmers.

I'm not defending Julia per se. I've been patiently observing from the sidelines to see how the language shapes up.

R is ranked lower year-on-year, but if you click into the actual rating time series you can see that R is on a tear into new highs of popularity. For that matter so is MATLAB. Julia is still buried in the next 50 list.

BTW i'm a julia proponent, I'm just starting into it but I like a lot about it.

>"popularity is droping right now, likely b/c of Julia"

I don't see how you concluded that? http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index?page=R

So is Lua.

Lua tables are more interesting than that. You can have an table that is indexed by any supported type. That means tables indexed by positive or negative integers, floating point values, references to other objects or other tables, true, false, strings, coroutines, and external memory references can all be indexes. You can also have a single table indexed by any combination of these.

Isn't that technically a hashtable and not an array?

In Lua the same data structure is used for both. The implementation optimizes the data structure like an array when you use a range of non-negative integers as indexes.