I agree about the slow startup, poor error messages and stacktraces, and that itself makes Julia a very rocky beginner experience. The number is times junior engineers have asked me to help resolve method errors is comically large. Unfortunately, when you know what is going on with dispatch you can see through the stacktrace quite easily, and this makes it difficult for experienced Julia devs to see why the status quo is a problem. I don’t imagine this will be easy to get the ayes for a change here, let alone what the change should be.

It is particularly frustrating when Julia advocates don’t see how much friction this causes and when they claim multiple dispatch and performance make this friction worth it. Surely core devs have seen beginners struggle as part of tutorials. Maybe they are just hoping these people will learn and figure it out? I’ve seen way too many people give up and just use python instead because they are not thinking about performance and just want things to work. I agree that I’m not seeing how Julia will take more of the general programming pie, especially given the work on getting JIT to Python in the next couple of years + ease of writing rust/go/zig, unless there’s significant more work put into reducing latency or PackageCompiler.jl.

But I don’t find the ecosystem fragmented or documentation poor. In fact one of the examples I give for great documentation is the Julia Manual. Can you provide examples where you find documentation lacking? As for Unicode glyphs, I find it hard to read too but domain scientists find it really easy and since that is the target audience I think the encouragement is warranted.