Is Julia the Next Python or Matlab?

Will Julia remain a niche like Matlab and Fortran or can it have broad appeal like Python?

In a recent discussion William Heymann raised what I think is an interesting issue. He remarked that much like MATLAB and Fortran Julia exists as a separate little island within computing. What do we mean by that? All sorts of people use Python. For web servers, data science, machine learning, scripting and many other things. While nobody in the right mind would write a web service in Fortran.

Analogies are of course hard to get right. In terms of what Julia is to the computing world today, this analogy is not too far fetched.

But when thinking about technology it is not enough to think about how things are today, one must also contemplate what the future brings. I am old enough to remember well that when I personally picked up Python for the first time, it was also a little island disconnected from the rest of computing. I have met plenty of Java and C/C++ people who would have disparaged languages such as Python or Ruby over the years using much the same arguments that are today leveled against Julia.

It was clear to me when I picked up Python some 20 years ago that it was a language that would go places. It had a compelling feature-set, flexible, powerful and easy to use. What Python lacked back then it was obvious could be changed in time, as the user base and popularity grew.