Hell, so do I; I absolutely hate learning new package ecosystems & infrastructure (but I absolutely do not have interest in learning a language without a decent package infrastructure). Probably a bigger blocker for me than learning the language itself!

But it's not clear to me that this "challenge" is intended to say that array operations are easy, for a newcomer to the language. As I understood it, it's an argument for Julia being better in the long run, for the code that requires "developer effort, performance and extensibility"; that is, elements of the language beyond the first few days of using it, for packages larger than what would be written by "amateur programmers"

If depicting usage for the amateur was the main point of the article, it totally went over my head