The reason is that they want to reserve the curly braces for other uses and the language devs call using `{}` to delimit code a 'waste of valuable ascii charact

The reason is that they want to reserve the curly braces for other uses and the language devs call using `{}` to delimit code a 'waste of valuable ascii characters'. Julia currently uses {} mostly for type systemy things like parametric types. When I write Foo{T}, this says that T is a parameter in the type Foo. E.g. a vector of Float64s in julia is an Array{Float64, 1} (1 means one dimensional) whereas a matrix of vectors of complex Ints is an Array{Array{Complex{Int}, 1}, 2}.