Various people have expressed skepticism of needing language level traits, but it's in vogue to be writing interface packages with no top level abstract types

Various people have expressed skepticism of needing language level traits, but it's in vogue to be writing interface packages with no top level abstract types (see Tables.jl) because we don't have some way to extensibly express being part of multiple type trees. It's challenging enough that Abstract Types have no interface specs (it's claimed that this is a feature, allows interfaces to develop over time), but it's even tougher when things get even looser with this new trend towards have untyped functions...even various interface package maintainers themselves have said the current state of affairs is difficult. And if we do want to opt into abstract typing, you're going to be inheriting lots of functionality that could be better broken into smaller typeclass like components (see AbstractArray). I think Julia is screaming for some capability to break up Abstract types and being able to inherit from multiple kinds of things, along with specified interfaces with these things. The problem is that this is very difficult, given the complex subtyping system and multiple dispatch. Adding more complexity exacerbates already present method and typing decidability issues. People are working on this on the periphery, but I hope it can become a priority of the core team and that it's solvable.