Racket (see my other comment) is my dream for the right place to start over for data and stats, but Julia is a pretty reasonable consolation prize. I feel like

Racket (see my other comment) is my dream for the right place to start over for data and stats, but Julia is a pretty reasonable consolation prize. I feel like there was enormous excitement about Julia early on, but that I rarely hear much about Julia in the stats space these days. Several years ago now, I took an introductory Bayesian stats course as part of a PhD program. At the time, I was impressed that I was able to do the obnoxious toy problems (the almost always unrealistic conjugate prior based examples) because the distributions(?) package had built-in knowledge of conjugacy. I think a lot of people are waiting for a "go signal" before jumping into Julia. I think at some point, if R Studio were to announce support for Julia within the R Studio IDE, I suspect that would serve as the signal. As for me, Julia has been well supported by Emacs Speaks Statistics forever, so I feel like I'm already living in the future of Julia editor tooling. Maybe it's time for me to give Julia another look.