> Over the last three years I have been doing a focussed investigation of a lot of different programming languages and styles

I don't know what your invesitgation covers, but a long time ago (2009) someone [0] did an interesting visual comparison of languages. sadly now it seems it's only available at archive.org [1], but I've often gone back to it, partly because it's such an elegant way of looking at some aspects of different languages.

0: http://blog.gmarceau.qc.ca 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20100412073334/http://blog.gmarc...

I liked Julia the first time I tried it years ago. I had some Matlab experience, so it seemed a similar, yet great improvement (no cost! more modern, but lacking some key libs or toolkits). I started programming Commodore BASIC in 1977 on my PET 2001. Then 6502 Assembler/machine language, C, Turbo Pascal, and many more. I have recently gone back to assembler because of AI. I don't miss hand coding assembler or creating macros that don't exist in FASM, but AI allows me to prompt for a terse program, using tried and true asm methods, which I can then audit. Julia has great math and scientific libraries, so my asm stuff isn't in competition with my asm efforts, but I am really enjoying the asm/AI thing for now. Granted this is for my own small projects. Coding is not my main job. I use coding in my other jobs to help me with certain tasks like scheduling, simulations, engineering, and project management. I was playing with the Julia version of cadCAD that was on Python, however, Julia has a lot of other libs that are way better to do dynamic or complexity studies than cadCAD.

Same, Julia really does just feel right to me. Which makes sense since I mostly program in R.

To me it seems as if scripting languages have it hard right now, aside from Python.

AI seems to have changed how people find and use new languages. The influx of new people kind of ... died down for many older languages here.