I think that's observation is fair, but I would also argue it is neither unusual (e.g. Python doesn't have one and it's probably one of the most popular languag

I think that's observation is fair, but I would also argue it is neither unusual (e.g. Python doesn't have one and it's probably one of the most popular language on the planet at the moment) nor a bad thing. In programming language design, you need to implement things and try out how they feel to use in practice. Programming language design is mostly about interfacing with humans, not computers. Something that has a beatiful proof on paper, but feels clumsy to use is bad programming language design. Eventually one of the efforts to make Julia an ISO standard will win and we'll be doing language design by committee and have a formal specification, but until then we'll try to build the best language we can ;).