[dual_basis]

Except it basically only runs on MacOS, which means that it doesn't have strong datacenter support, which means that it won't be used in any serious applications.

It's also not dynamic, which is almost a must-have for exploratory data analysis.

I will avoid a point-by-point rebuttal, mostly to avoid seeming too antagonistic, but Julia supports many of the other features on the list you provided, and (more importantly, for the case at hand) already has proven it's capability in the differentiable programming paradigm with Zygote.

[taharvey]

You apparently aren't familiar with Swift at all. I'd recommend exploring more before answering.

Swift had Linux support since it open sourced 4 years ago. IBM, AWS, Google all have very performant server-side swift packages for manner of things from servers to protocols. Our company is using Swift for a Linux-only embedded environments.

If you think the future is dynamic, you're not regressing the past, or the trajectory of the future. Dynamic languages keep a compiler from understanding the code.

Compilers are just code optimization heuristics - like AI for developers. If you make a language and compiler that has a strong ontology for the intent of code (a type system), it can break code down into functional proofs, then understand how to optimize it and in ways that aren't possible in a dynamic language that breaks the chain of intent.

Julia is still pretty niche at this point, and just recently got tools as fundamental as a debugger.

[dual_basis]

I understand quite well the connection between static type systems and proofs, and how compilers work. As pointed out by another user here, an amazing amount of optimization can be done while maintaining the dynamic nature of the code and, in my opinion, while doing data analysis this is an absolute necessity.

As for static typing providing a proof of correctness, yes, many times I have wished that Python had better static analysis so that I didn't have to run my program only to get an error halfway through. On the other hand, when writing an experiment I rarely know at the start what the eventual design will look like. It is rarely worth setting up a fully expressive type system at the onset, so I wouldn't really get many of the correctness guarantees aside from existing types. My experience with mypy/PyCharm has demonstrated that a surprising amount of type inference can be done in dynamic languages, which allows me to catch most errors prior to runtime at this point.

While Swift the language might have support on Linux, last I used it (~ 8 months ago, when this initiative was announced) it was cumbersome at best. See the Swift for Linux initiative which, while being a fervent supporter of getting Swift working on Linux, admits right in the introduction that it is not great: http://swift-linux.refi64.com/en/latest/

As mentioned there, even when I got the core language working I was smacked in the face with another of the core issues with Swift: the ecosystem is anemic, at best, on Linux. Almost all of the libraries are MacOS only.

[eigenspace]

You apparently aren't familiar with dynamic languages at all. I'd recommend exploring more before answering.

In particular, you seem to be conflating being dynamic with being interpreted. Julia is an incredibly dynamic langauage whose JIT compilation strategy is essentially lazy AOT compilation. As soon as a method is called the first time, that method and all it's inferred dependent methods are compiled down to very efficient machine code and run. If one writes statically inferrable code, all sorts of code optimization, theorem proving and eliding will be done just like in a static language.

However, we also have the option to write non-inferrable dynamic code where the called methods depend on runtime values when needed. This will (obviously) come with a performance hit, but as long as you know what you're doing, it can be a great boon so long as you keep type instabilities outside of performance critical code.

> Julia is still pretty niche at this point, and just recently got tools as fundamental as a debugger.

Julia has had debuggers for ages. It's just that when 1.0 launched last year we moved to a new intermediate representation which broke all the existing debuggers. The old ones could have been updated, but it was decided that people wanted to start over from scratch having learned a lot of lessons from debuggers like Gallium.jl.

Julia is indeed a niche language. However, in the field of scientific computing, compared to Swift's ecosystem julia might as well be python. Swift has no scientific computing ecosystem to speak of.