"Why does Julia work so well", "The unreasonable effectiveness of Julia" tbh read as pure fanboyism at best, but more realistically as an effort to drum up a language that could need some attention, or getting "web mentions" for some hidden investment agenda.
"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of X" is a reference to the well-known 'the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences'. It's turned into some sort of meme. Maybe you've seen 'the unreasonable effectiveness of recurrent neural networks' before.
What you were referring to is a talk by a core developer at JuliaCon 2019 titled 'The unreasonable effectiveness of multiple dispatch' [1], which has less of a fanboy-vibe imho.
Edit: Oh. I didn't notice the arstechnica article had this exact title. That's a bit cheap...
I suspect that the title of the Ars Technica article was a reference to the talk title, which was a reference to many other pieces with similar titles, which are all ultimately references to the original one.
As someone who’s actually used the language (sigh) the “hype” around Julia is more excitement about a modern language that’s hitting a broad sweet spot in a unique way.
Julia is a delightful combination of ease of use, clarity, and performance. It lets one concentrate much more on the problem at hand than language related boilerplate (I’m looking at you, Rust).
I’m hopeful that Julia will become one of the most used general purpose programming languages in the long run. It’s certainly got what it takes!
But the article is literally about why it optimizes as well as it does, and what are the engineering trade-offs. In the first section:
>But what we will see in this example is that Julia does not always act like other scripting languages. There are some "lunches lost" that we will have to understand. Understanding how this design decision effects the way you must code is crucial to producing efficient Julia code.
This is more about how the compilation process is working to both help people understand how to write optimal code and to understand what optimizing compilers need in order to work. The engineering trade-offs, like slow performance of globals, errors in functions that would change types, etc. are all demonstrated. If you read a full description of the engineering trade-offs and think that it's a marketing tool, then you must think it made the right trade-offs? I don't understand why that would be bad.
These are all independent pieces that were written at different times by different people.
Where do you see the arrogance in the OP? It's showing exactly what's being claimed