That is truly the dumbest critique of Julia that's been published. So dumb I didn't bother refuting it at the time, but apparently people take it seriously?

- Hello world is slow? Really? Yeah, it's not a hello-world-oriented programming language.

- One-based indexing is questionable? Troll much?

- Using `ccall` is unsafe? No kidding, there's no way to call a shared library that doesn't crash if you lie to it.

- `@printf` sucks? Then don't use it. I never do. The `print` function works for 99% of cases.

- Julia development is slowing down? Whiffed on that call.

Regarding the C ffi point, you can use Clang.jl to generate correct bindings so that you don't have to read C header files. But note that if you want to call a function in C you need to look at and match its signature, so it's not all that onerous to have to do the same from Julia. Julia's C interop is so good that several other languages have copied it since it came out.

Yeah, but how else would you judge about the language before spending months on learning it? Critique can be dumb like 1-based index for arrays or nitpicking on syntax. However, I tried Julia several years ago and start-up times was the reason I dropped it. Was it a dumb thing to do too? I was disappointed that a promise of being a dynamic language came with some "but"s. And if you have a lot of scripts that you need to run one-by-one, you don't notice the real speed of the language, all you notice is sluggishness.

If one isn't willing to spend some time on learning a language, one simply shouldn't write a scathing blogpost about it.

> So dumb I didn't bother refuting it at the time, but apparently people take it seriously?

You definitely should have because from what I saw during my google searches this idiotic article was mentioned a couple of times.