Sorry, slightly off topic, but as someone not really versed in Julia, but who sees it frequently on HN (but, honestly, nowhere else, but that could just be the type of industry I'm in), what would you say the closest "competitor" is for Julia?
Or rather, if I am currently using programming language X to do Y, what would be the values for X and Y that should make me really want to consider Julia instead.
Using python for any kind of high performance computing — array/based operations (especially operations in sequence over one array, which will occur in a single pass), distributing work over several processors, moving data to the GPU, even just wanting your for-loops to be fast — all of these are easier in Julia.
Matlab, Octave, R, Perl, Python, in order. Especially consider it if you're a scientist, engineer or mathematician - while it's general-purpose, it's really good at these domains.
Or rather, if I am currently using programming language X to do Y, what would be the values for X and Y that should make me really want to consider Julia instead.