"building a new language they hope will be suited to practically any task"<p>I can't do better than Randall Munroe on that assertion: <a href="http://xkcd.com/927/" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/927/</a><p>"Bezanson ... had come to the conclusion that the tradeoffs inherent in most languages were avoidable."<p>What tradeoffs specifically?<p>"Together they fashioned a general purpose programming language"<p>Great! We can displace all our other languages and the whole world will have one happy language. Just like Ada or COBOL, right?<p>"That said, it isn’t for everyone. Bezanson says it’s not exactly ideal for building desktop applications or operating systems, and though you can use it for web programming, it’s better suited to technical computing."<p>Oh, so there are insoluble tradeoffs after all.