Unfortunately there are few domain specific libraries available for Julia, like astropy.

We're in the same situation with Julia than 10 years ago when we started moving from IDL to Python. It was painful as Python wasn't born a scientific language, it awkwardly became so with numarray, numpy, numba, pandas, matplotlib, numexpr, scipy, pythran, scikit and whatever never-ending additional mess it requires.

At least Julia is domain specific. Like Matlab and IDL, it's JITed, vectorized and ready to use OOTB without the need for third-party libs.

Still, I really wish GDL was ready back then...

It is also a pain to learn some of these libraries in Python where they are basically just wrappers

NeoVim put Lua on my radar, but your article on LuaTeX [1] that was shared here recently raised it much higher on the priority list. The chickenize package seems a fun way to get comfortable with it as well.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/731581/ (I'm assuming you're the same Lee Phillips.)

That’s me.

And, yes, plus Chickenize has some fun documentation.

For config, CUE