I think the most egregious problem from a holistic perspective is their lack of prioritization for software engineering. Things like packing large amounts of sp

I think the most egregious problem from a holistic perspective is their lack of prioritization for software engineering. Things like packing large amounts of specialized mathematics constructs (and whole libraries like git and markdown) into the main distribution (causing memory size and startup time problems), lack of interfaces or similar abstraction tools (which are strictly speaking not necessary from a functionality perspective, but are useful as organizational and code safety tools), and an inability to tune their garbage collector. Their debugger was also pretty shoddy when I last used it (e.g. it wasn't a priority for many years), but I'm pretty sure they have fixed it significantly by now. And hey they have macros, which just invokes the problems with lisps, but at least you can do whatever you want programming construct wise if you really want to. "Internally" they have some poor interactions with external developers (meaning people not from MIT). [deleted a rant] In the end I suspect Linus is probably worse to work with, it probably comes with the territory, so it's not like it's a deal breaker. All of this is to say I agree with this article: http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/ http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/ one of the best things a programmer can do is contribute to tools, specifically including Julia, which advance our ability to understand climate change. It really is in my opinion the best programming language to further scientific advancement. I just wish I had the capability to work with them.