It may indeed be a strange choice, but I think there are many reasons for why one might try Julia beyond the speed aspect. The main one for me (and I think the language designs also state something to this effect) is the language wide paradigm of multiple dispatch on parametric types. Coming originally from a C/Fortran old school numerical computing background, it seems to me that many of the best numerical software (your lapacks,fftws, and whatnot) eventually end up at a point where you have a flat collection of a bunch of foo functions with some protocol over the function suffixes and signatures, so that you can can get at an optimized foo_* at the bottom level with a uniform interface through a top level foo at the level of granularity of basic fooness as understood by end users. Julia formalizes this structure, which is I think part of how it achieves speed, but more importantly allows people to focus on programming to the essential abstraction and adding in methods to optimize or specialize after the fact.