> In programming I tend to think the whole computer and its OS and so on as the programming tool. My impression is that for Julia folks Julia is something total

> In programming I tend to think the whole computer and its OS and so on as the programming tool. My impression is that for Julia folks Julia is something totally separate from anything else in the computer. But I don't understand why. Is it that its felt that changing syntax on the fly is too cognitively demanding or something? This is something that one gets used to very fast. This comment really does not resonate with me. It sounds like a criticism of Smalltalk, not Julia. Not sure what it means to change "syntax on the fly", but that does sound like the sort of design that is maximally flexible, at a considerable cost to readability. Macros already allow you to embed DSLs (as long as they parse), and almost everyone agree that they should be used sparingly. > And also tends to ease the IMHO weird hung-ups on syntax. In fact, I think Julia has made some (IMHO misguided) syntactic decisions because they just want to do something differently from Python just for the sake of being different. I find this totally senseless. I am not aware of any decision that is done just for the sake of being different. If there are any, then yes that's senseless.