I have to admit i didn't follow this discussion although i'm a big fan of structuring data into Dicts.
I still understood http://julialang.org/blog/2012/02/why-we-created-julia/ as somehow setting the tone for Julia as a language. And i find > We want something as usable for general programming as Python, > and dictionary are especially a means for general programming (Arrays are not, Lists are). And We never want to mention types when we don’t feel like it. > contradicts a little bit the Dict{Symbol,Any}( :col => "l1" ) syntax. I would not claim that something goes wrong here, but my expectation would have been rather: non-verbose syntax where it can be avoided. And i disagree, Dict are not just another data structure.
