> You can use NumPy until the cows come home and you will be no more qualified to contribute to its internals than you were when you started.

Just for whatever it's worth, as an occasional contributor to numpy who is an absolutely terrible C programmer, there's a _lot_ you can contribute with pure python. Yes, the core of the functionality is in C, but most of the user-facing functionality isn't.

That having been said, I completely agree on the benefits of Julia.

However, I'd argue that Julia has the potential to compete with (or replace) the scientific python ecosystem for a completely different reason: It's more seamless to call C/Fortran functions from Julia than from Python. (Though Cython and f2py makes it pretty easy in python.)

There's an awful lot of very useful, well-designed, very well-tested scientific libraries written in C and Fortran. It's far better (i.m.o.) to have a higher-level language be able to call them seamlessly than to have a high-level language where reimplementing them is a better option. (Julia does wonderfully in this regard. Python does pretty well, but not as well, i.m.o.)

Also, from what I've seen, I think the Julia and scientific python ecosystems are more complimentary than competing, at the moment. There seems to be a lot of cross-pollination of ideas and collaboration, which is a very good thing.

(...And I just realized who I'm replying to... Well, ignore most of what I said. You know all of that far, far better than I do! Julia is _really_ interesting and useful, by the way!)