I remember checking Julia some time back, and thinking "This looks almost perfect".
Macros (and homoiconicity), multiple dispatch, the Types section of the manual is geek-porn, speedy more than enough, support for distributed computation, yada, yada (yeah, I'm a programming language fetishist ;-). I wished basically only two things, threading support and some way to cache compiled code. And today I checked what is happenning, and whadda-ya-know, 0.3.0 has been released, stating, among other things: - System image caching for fast startup. - Multi-process shared memory support. (multi-threading support is in progress and has been a major summer focus) WoooooOOOOOOOoooooooooo. Haven't expected so fast progress. Next very pleasant surprise was trying out GTK. I feared (sadly running on windows at work) that the installation would fail because it would try to compile the dependencies from sources and I don't have mingw on PATH by default, but instead binaries were downloaded. And then, after writing a bit of test code, it worked without a glitch. I had more troubles with getting some packages work with python (no pre-compiled bins, and although I can manage, sometimes getting all the transitive dependencies is an afternoon of downloading yet another source archive, ./configure-ing, make-ing, digging into why it failed, patching, rinsing, repeating ...). So right now, I'd give Julia about 6 points out of 5, (as 1.0 approaches, the score will most likely rise to 10 out of 5, don't skimp on the awesome ;-). In-fucking-credible work, thanks to everyone who helped to make it happen, C.K.
