Criticisms of languages should not be taken as criticisms of their creators or users. I don't see anything wrong with saying "Language X does Y better than language Z in my use cases."

Languages are toolsets and programmers are always looking for appropriate tools for a given task. It seems crazy to demand that people not be able to talk honestly about their experiences using a given tool. Python doesn't have feelings, it won't be sad if you don't like it.

Even if it does, what's wrong with stating an opinion? Why does an honest opinion have to be branded "smear"?

You seem to be suggesting it’s not fair to make superior comparisons to python until Julia has mainstream popularity. That’s rubbish. Python is much less expressive.

Python does have excellent libraries and it fits many people's mental model of programming, but not mine. I still use it often. However, for a dynamic language, it is simply not very expressive. It has no multi-line lambdas, OO syntax that I find a bit awkward, and some other limitations. These can be seen as advantages, since they enforce the "there's only one way to do it" philosophy, but that doesn't work for me.

Hmm ... I remember when Perl was king and Python was the shiny new thing. I watched Python supporters belittle Perl as "line noise" and other quite silly descriptions. They were all proud of "there is only one way do to it" versus the linguistic Perl way of "there is more than one way to do it."

I am experiencing something of a sense of schadenfreude over defense of Python against a newcomer. 20 years on, Perl is still in widespread use, still unbeatable for its growing use cases. I don't wish to speculate where Python will be 20 years from now. I do know that Fortran will still be around. That's about the only sure thing.

Wish advocates of all new languages stuck with this principle.

I wasn't being disrespectful of Python. We are allowed to criticize languages. The fact is, by any reasonable measure, Julia is more expressive than Python, which was all I stated. This is an advantage of Julia. Both languages have advantages and disadvantages, and comparing them honestly is necessary for people to make a good choice when selecting a language for a project. C is less expressive than Python or Julia, but no one would say C is a bad language based on that. And no C programmer would disagree with that statement.

It's not about putting any language or community down.

By your argument, it sounds like we cannot talk about any advantages a new language may have over existing ones. If we stuck to that, how could we possibly make any argument over why one may want to select a newer language?

Can you give concrete examples of where Julia is more expressive than Python? I can think of defining custom units https://medium.com/@Jernfrost/defining-custom-units-in-julia...

I give examples of expressivity in my comment above. The multiple dispatch is completely ubiquitous in Julia, being the default. This allows for the definition of flexible and extensible interfaces similar to Haskell's typeclasses. Macros are used to make things like PyCall or generate fast and flexible CUDA code.

This is not easily possible in Python, especially not with high performance.