Well, it's agreeing that Julia's goals (promises? aspirations?) are worthwhile. Whether Julia itself actually delivers on those promises is a different question that isn't addressed in the original post.

I like what Julia is doing but I just dislike the syntax. It seems to resemble ruby, whose syntax I also think is ugly, which to me resembles a modern form of basic.

Hmmm... this seems to be an odd first impression.

There is the use of @ (but to signal macros), but otherwise, the syntax is much closer to a cross between Python and matlab except nicer for doing math.

I tried writing a few programs in Julia and got sucked in by how effective it is. The real surprise is that just a few weeks in instead of pulling up R to do a quick calculation my fingers decided they wanted Julia.

Similar story for me. I did last years Advent of code in Julia and it was great.

Personally, I think when you write Julia in shorthand form, it looks nothing like ruby or basic.

for example, check out parts of the stdlib: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/base/operator...

but in the end, julia really is a lisp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK3zRXhrFZY

I know what you mean. I especially dislike the use of an "end" keyword everywhere without a corresponding "begin" keyword.

Does it really matter though? I mean, whether it's a closing bracket or a whitespace demarcated control flow - does it really effect anything you do in the language? Julia solves a lot of problems, like real problems - quibbling over begin/end vs {/} or white space seems kinda silly.

Meanwhile I have actually seen real world lost productivity due to white space in python. Curly brackets not so much. Never seen lost productivity over begin/end but I'm sure it's happened. It seems silly to me either way - it doesn't really effect anything.

I think that's inherited from matlab.

Huh okay. I’ve never used Matlab but one of the first languages I played with was a basic for simple game development

begin is a Julia keyword though it.

But yes end closes begin, for, function and while.

Yeah that’s exactly what I’m talking about

With the slightest hint arising that Julia would be the future of ML and DL, I learned it.

But, then what?

I could not use it anywhere I worked. The ecosystem was lacking.

Julia is good, but for what exactly?

People involved with Julia are always big with words, but when will I see it in use somewhere?

You can apply to a job here,

https://juliacomputing.com/case-studies/

The ecosystem is a superset of Pythons: https://github.com/JuliaPy/PyCall.jl

It's probably more fair to claim that R/Python/Julia have the same ecosystem now if you are willing to deal with speed bumps and some clunky interfaces. Because there are packages going in both direction for all three.