Julia? It ticks quite a few of those boxes.

Its performance is good enough that I'm able to drop C++ (I'm a mathematical modeller), it's amazing at multidimensional array manipulation, and its typing system is really good. It just feels nice to program in. Bonus, one of the inspirations was Lisp, so it's got good metaprogramming. Also it's free software, made by people at MIT, so your conscience can remain appeased.

It's still a young language, but libraries are being built for it at an impressive rate, and it has a good collection so far. I think it has a great future ahead of it.

Yes it does have 1-based indexing. But then it's a language made by mathematicians, and like most of them (Fortran, Matlab, Octave, R, Maple, Mathematica) they usually index from 1. There are pros and cons, but ultimately it's just down to personal preference (personally I prefer 1-based indexing).

However Julia does support arbitrary starting indices, whether it's from 0, or say you wanted to index by year and start from 1960. It's not something I've tried, but I watched a presentation on it once and it seemed there were some very clever things you could do with it.

The plotting isn't quite as bad as it sounds. You can either use whichever graphics library you're familiar with (Winston for Matlab style, PyPlot for Matplotlib style, Gadfly for Grammar of Graphics style, GR, Plotly.js, AsciiPlot etc.) or you can use Plots.jl and tell it which backend to use. It would be nice if there was just one way to do it (same for saving and loading data), but I've always managed to get something nice working.

I primarily use Julia now, and I agree, "end" tags would make Python a lot more comfortable for me (plus it would match the Python koan "be explicit, not implicit", i.e. explicitly end your blocks with an end tag).

That said, as a mathematical modeller, I just find Julia easier than Python it pretty much every way going (I even prefer the 1-based indexing, which is a feature in nearly every programming language used by mathematicians). I know Python sees quite a bit of use in science (along with R, which is the other big name), but I think Julia is definitely going to gain some ground on Python in the future, especially as it approaches the 1.0 release.

What's the one thing that a new year changes? The numbers you write when you write the date. The one it takes 3 months to get used to. 1999 -> 2000, when all the digits changed, made a far bigger difference than 2000 -> 2001, when only 1 changed.

When 2000 approached, we didn't say "no, hold on, nothing interesting about this date, let's wait until 2001 to celebrate the _real_ millennium"? Well, some people did, but the rest of us were busy celebrating the change of the (arbitrary) year's most significant digit a year early, and getting used to writing the new date.

And when people say "the 1980s", they mean 1980 to 1989, not 1981 to 1990. People who smugly claim that 1990 is part of the 1980s can sit in the corner and be technically right all by themselves while no one else cares.

I'm not really interested in the labelling of centuries relative to some arbitrary event that was not marked at the time. I'm far more interested in when the most significant digits change.

It seems therefore sad that the last human who was born in a year beginning with 18 passed seemingly without note.

Or a 60 stone gorilla. Now that sounds scary!

(Okay 57 stone). Honestly I have no idea what 800 lb is supposed to mean without making that translation, and if you talk about a 200 lb human, is that heavy? It's just not a meaningful number system to me.

No, I wouldn't get an iPhone even if it were free. I don't want to buy into their ecosystem, nor do I want to reward their tax dodging, or their cult like practices.

When I open up someone else's code, and I find the indentation isn't quite what I find comfortable, I can easily change the tab size and everything magically appears the way I like it. With spaces I have to manually reindent everything to look right.

Sorry, as far as I'm concerned, it's spaces that are the unholy mess, not tabs. Unless you're talking about right-aligning comments after code, but frankly that's a mess no matter how you try it. At least with tabs the comments line up 3/4s of the time.

You can get incredibly fine control over your mouse on Linux with xinput. Yes, you have to use the command line, and it takes a little experimentation, but it's all there for you to customise. To turn off mouse acceleration on OS X you need to open up a terminal and type
defaults write .GlobalPreferences com.apple.mouse.scaling -1
Then log out and back in, and frankly it still feels off. There is no way at all, short of installing 3rd party software, of turning off mouse wheel acceleration.

Mac keyboards use some weird ANSI / ISO hybrid keyboard layout if you're a UK user. If you plug in a PC ISO keyboard, then it will swap around a bunch of the keys (not just the @ and " keys). To make matters worse, I don't use the qwerty layout, and I cannot find a PC ISO Colemak layout for Mac. Karabiner used to let you fix the problem, but that no longer works (since it's classified as a keyboard logger). Ukelele lets you create new keyboard layouts... apparently. I struggled for several hours before giving up.

As for applications that still won't work properly with retina displays: MS Office, all the font and style previews are blocky. Inkscape, it's the entire application (apparently because it relies on XQuartz, which might never get retina support). It's certainly been getting better, but retina has been available for several years now.

So I'm left with a mouse profile and keyboard layout that just don't feel right and that I can't seem to fix. Certainly, it wasn't trivial to fix on Linux, but I did manage to figure it out, whereas I gave up trying on OS X. You might rightly say "these are some pretty niche problems", and maybe you're right, but they're pretty important to me, so that's been my experience with OS X.

That is debatable. Having used Linux for around 13 years, and OS X for about 4, I personally find Linux easier to use. The number of times I've struggled to make something work in OS X, even something as simple as turn off mouse scroll wheel acceleration and make the mouse movement less jumpy.

OS X is probably easy to use if you're happy with the default configuration and all your applications can be installed via drag and drop, but the moment you start trying to do something else, or want a different music player to iTunes, then that user friendliness just seems to dwindle away. I still don't know how to make my mouse feel right, or stop many applications from looking horrible on a retina display. I find aptitude much easier than the mix of Mac Ports and manual installation / updating.

Frankly, if I didn't need access to Microsoft products for collaboration purposes and hadn't been given a MBP by my work, then I'd happily use Linux full time (btw no, I'm not an application developer or full time programmer, just a university researcher).

Thou dost make a point, but I think I'm going to ignore it, as it's now non-standard English, I'm sure thou wilst agree. Art thou from the US? because none of thine examples are from the UK.

You'll still find 'thou' in various parts of the UK. It died out partly because of a dislike of Quakers who refused to accept ranking in society (they're lovely people), and a fear of not recognising one's betters (since the classes became increasingly blurred), but it didn't die out completely. Also in Shetland you'll hear 'du', 'dine', etc.

Unfortunately, I think the rules for using 'thou', 'thee', and 'thy' are fairly complex. "Thou art", "thou goest", "thou dost", "thou wilt", ...

That said, while most of us don't use it, we can still figure out what people mean when they say it, rather like how we can figure out what people mean when they use singular they.

Just because something is singular, does not mean you have to use "is". Have you forgotten singular you?

"You are right" not "You is right"
equally
"They are right" not "They is right"

You are allowed to use "are" with a singular, such as "what are you wearing?" when referring to just one person. For some reason everyone seems to forget that usage when quibbling over singular they!

However, while I'm perfectly happy to use singular they (and frequently do), I wouldn't start combining it with "is".

I've been using Linux exclusively for about 13 years. To me, 2003 was the year of the Linux desktop, and then every year since then.

Just because it hasn't achieved the popularity of Windows or OSX, doesn't mean it isn't just as capable (I've used a MacBook Pro for 4 years at work, and I still haven't been persuaded to make the switch at home). I installed it on my mother's ageing laptop a few years ago, and she's been pretty happy using it since then.