I started playing with Julia in 2013, after searching for a Matlab replacement that was (according to my notes at the time) "... open (or more open than Matlab)

I started playing with Julia in 2013, after searching for a Matlab replacement that was (according to my notes at the time) "... open (or more open than Matlab), fast, parallelizable, with good scientific/math libraries." My intent was to write a reusable and extensible library to enable my day to day work (astrodynamics and estimation). Two years later I had implemented enough tools and gained enough proficiency with it that I switched entirely away from using Matlab at all (even for smaller data analysis tasks), and I haven't looked back. It has made me objectively better at my job, and a much better programmer overall.