Julia is taking some inroads in climate modelling: "when the coder-climatologists of the Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMA) — a coalition of US-based scientists, engineers and mathematicians — set out to build a model from the ground up, they opted for a language that could handle their needs. They opted for Julia."
It probably helps that Julia and Fortran are both column major.
When interfacing with C languages, that can be a big penalty (depending on the complexity of the algorithm).
It will probably take two generations of developers to make this happen, but well worth it. When I was studying atmospheric science I tried to understand OpenWRF (weather research forecasting) and the barrier was too high... And I had programming experience, imagine those with none!
An open source project is only as useful as it is accessible to it's average developer base.
That's awesome, and not at all a surprise! It makes a lot of sense when building from the ground up to choose a great tool, and Julia has had some serious adoption in academia.
I think long term it has enormous potential to take over as _the_ language for modelling.
The reason is that for every hyper optimized climate model there are a thousand small or medium models. For these Julia offers sufficient performance and excellent developer experience.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02310-3
https://clima.caltech.edu/