I think your pain points with Julia are real, but they don’t bother me too much. I mostly use Lisp languages, enjoy but am not so good with Haskell, so I am very flexible in syntax. I shared the dislike for 1 based indexing, but when I recently started evaluating Wolfram/One and Language, my limited experience with Julia and Octave made Wolfram’s use of 1 based indexing OK.

I love experimenting with programming languages but I don’t like recommending languages just as I don’t like recommending movies: I figure that everyone has their own tastes, and that is a good thing.