Since programming is fundamentally mathematics (grin) that means it's a "general purpose language". There's nothing whatsoever preventing it from being a first-

Since programming is fundamentally mathematics (grin) that means it's a "general purpose language". There's nothing whatsoever preventing it from being a first-class string manipulation language for instance. Granted, the emphasis has been on applied mathematics. I think in the longer run it will branch in several directions, one being realtime simulation - and then on to games. It is close to C++ efficiency (plus or minus) already, and it will only get better. I haven't looked into Julia's GC implementation in detail, but I'm hopeful that with a little effort it's easy to avoid "stop the world" GC collections.