I think this is a major mistake for Zig's target adoption market - low level programmers trying to use a better C.
Julia is phenomenally great for solo/small projects, but as soon as you have complex dependencies that _you_ can't update - all the overloading makes it an absolute nightmare to debug.
Julia's choice to encourage people naming their variables greek letters is bad though. There's a whole group of students who struggle with the symbols, but understand the concepts (a residual). Julia, when used to its full capabilities, gains an enormous amount of its power from a huge amount of clever abstractions. But in the 1st-course-in-numerical-methods class context, this can be more offputting than the "why np?" stuff this article mentions.
For teaching linear algebra, MATLAB is unironically the best choice - as the language was originally designed for that exact purpose. The problem is that outside of a numerical methods class, MATLAB is a profound step backwards.
I can do it, and I do similar such things in C++ - but the biggest benefit of "safe defaults" is the standardization of such behaviors, and the resultant expectations/ecosystem.
It's slightly less cynical than that - it takes about eight years to design a space mission and rocket, but doing the detailed design is expensive as hell, so in order to meet a budget, they then change the mission, so they can go back to the vastly more affordable task of talking about doing work, vs doing work
Page 2 has the figure. Getting people to not smoke has been the most effective treatment in our lifetime.
Public health is a really big deal, and RFK et al are a disaster for the nation.