Personally, I would much rather see Julia undergo serious upheavals in an attempt to make an elegant language that works really well for scientific/HPC computin

Personally, I would much rather see Julia undergo serious upheavals in an attempt to make an elegant language that works really well for scientific/HPC computing. Too many languages get trapped trying to provide backwards compatibility for everything and you end up with a lot of unintuitive cruft and quirks. If you want a language for "getting stuff done", use Python. But I find that I get a lot done with Julia in spite of constant change (in fact, I don't use Python at all).