A more appropriate title for the OP would have been:
"A new language that makes it easy to write and use generic algorithms on a growing number of custom types developed by others is bound to experience growing pains as difficult-to-foresee correctness bugs have to be discovered and fixed over time."
In my humble opinion, this kind of universal composability, which Julia makes easy via multiple dispatch and naming conventions, is the underlying root cause of all the correctness bugs that have surfaced as the language has evolved. But the bugs are being fixed, one at a time, and ultimately the result should be both beautiful and powerful. We will be all be thankful for it!
The most tragic thing here to me is that we're losing Yuri — who has been an invaluable contributor and bug-reporter for issues like these — and that Yuri got burned out instead of feeling empowered.
Yeah, good point. Sometimes I wonder if the fact that so many of the folks developing and using Julia are both highly educated (e.g., in math) and insanely smart (evidently) is a barrier to mass adoption. That is, I wonder if the broader mass of developers out there -- many of whom are less knowledgeable -- find it difficult to benefit from and contribute to the Julia ecosystem.
I am not sure I know of any statically typed languages with generics, that experienced the same kind of problems on multiple occasions. The only one I am aware of is C# and array variance, which is kept for compatibility purposes.
"A new language that makes it easy to write and use generic algorithms on a growing number of custom types developed by others is bound to experience growing pains as difficult-to-foresee correctness bugs have to be discovered and fixed over time."
In my humble opinion, this kind of universal composability, which Julia makes easy via multiple dispatch and naming conventions, is the underlying root cause of all the correctness bugs that have surfaced as the language has evolved. But the bugs are being fixed, one at a time, and ultimately the result should be both beautiful and powerful. We will be all be thankful for it!