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.

For what it's worth, that hasn't been my experience with Julia – I've found it easier to debug than Python, Scala, or Clojure (other languages I've used at jobs.)

The tooling makes it easy to tell which version of a method you're using, though that's rarely an issue in practice. And the fact that methods are open to extension makes it really easy to fix occasional upstream bugs where the equivalent has to wait for a library maintainer in Python.

500kloc Julia over 4 years, so not a huge codebase, but not trivial either.

Ada has them, and I guess we all agree on its systems programming nature.

NOOOO!

What Ada (and Rust) calls generics is very different -- it is like template functions in C++.

In those languages the version of the function that is selected is based on the declared type of the arguments.

In CLOS, Dylan, Julia the version of the function that is selected is based on the runtime type of the actual arguments.

Here's an example in Dylan that you can't do in Ada / Rust / C++ / Java.

    define method fib(n) fib(n-1) + fib(n-2) end;
    define method fib(n == 0) 0 end;
    define method fib(n == 1) 1 end;

The `n == 1` is actually syntactic sugar for the type declaration `n :: singleton(1)`.

The Julia version is slightly more complex.

    fib(n) = fib(Val(n))
    fib(::Val{n}) where {n} = fib(n-1) + fib(n-2)
    fib(::Val{0}) = 0
    fib(::Val{1}) = 1
    
    println(fib(30))

This is perhaps a crazy way to write `fib()` instead of a conventional `if/then/else` or `?:` or switch with a default case, but kinda fun :-)

This of course is just a function with a single argument, but you can do the same thing across multiple arguments.

    define method ack(m, n) ack(m-1, ack(m, n-1)) end;
    define method ack(m == 0, n) n+1 end;
    define method ack(m, n == 0) ack(m-1, 1) end;

You missed the way Ada does OOP, and went completely overboard talking about generics.

As you can see from my comment history, I am quite aware of CLOS, Lisp variants and Dylan.

Last I checked, Ada does not have multimethods/generic functions in the sense of CLOS, Dylan and Julia. It has static function overloading, and single-argument dispatch, just like C++.

>The feature I want is multimethods -- function overloading based on the runtime (not compile time) type of all the arguments.

>Programming with it is magical, and its a huge drag to go back to languages without it. Just so much better than common OOP that depends only on the type of one special argument (self, this etc).

Can you give one or two examples? And why is programming with it magical?

For a start it means you can much more naturally define arithmetic operators for a variety of built in and user-defined types, and this can all be done with libraries not the core language.

Because methods aren't "inside" objects, but just look like functions taking (references to) structs, you can add your own methods to someone else's types.

It's really hard to give a concise example that doesn't look artificial, because it's really a feature for large code bases.

Here's a tutorial example for Julia

https://scientificcoder.com/the-art-of-multiple-dispatch

Thanks.

Erlang/Elixir also has that