I keep on messing around with Julia, but I never stick with it. I have nothing in particular against the language, but I don't do a lot of scientific computing, so my motivations to use it are not that great.
It can. However, Julia made a very strong push to target the scientific computing niche (very strong array support, ease of writing tight loops in native code, etc) - and such it has a very quickly growing ecosystem of high quality scientific packages.
In comparison, Julia has relatively few web frameworks, GUI toolkits, etc..
Sure it can. But why would I pick it up over, say, rust? Rust gives me the productivity of a dynamic language, and the speed of a systems language. Julia gives the same. So, given similar pros/cons, the choice comes down to aethsetics, and Julia just didn't give me a compelling enough reason to switch.
I think Julia gets unfairly pigeonholed. It's got a great concurrency story, for example. I know what you mean though, it always seems to be the language I'll write my "next" project in.
