Nice to see this "debunking". I was especially bothered by the analysis of performance, focusing so much on start up time (which btw has vastly improved since).

Nice to see this "debunking". I was especially bothered by the analysis of performance, focusing so much on start up time (which btw has vastly improved since). It's hard to remember if some of the concerns raised were valid at the time, but as of now none of the criticisms seem to hold. To make a concrete example: Julia testing framework (Base.Test) is now very user friendly and widely used: with one command at the console one can generate a package which is already set up to be tested remotely on different architectures. As a consequence, package coverage is generally reasonably high.