I think the main idea behind Julia is to minimize the burden of doing the necessary but wasteful software engineering parts of scientific computation. Let the

I think the main idea behind Julia is to minimize the burden of doing the necessary but wasteful software engineering parts of scientific computation. Let the language optimize more so you don't have to write a C++ library or figure out how to use it optimally. Don't waste as much time setting up your environment or worrying about platform compatibility. Don't worry about using multiple languages for different types of computation. And make the on-ramp fairly painless by being a convenient glue language. It fills the gap of otherwise not having a managed and JITed language for general mathematical computation. If it's more burdensome for you to switch, then don't switch.