That's true. I am of course biased in talking mostly to people on the Julia Slack etc. who enjoy the language a lot and do interesting things with it.
That's one of the reasons, though, why I never find the "how many people are using it" argument the most convincing when talking about the merits of a language. Because most people I've seen using R, Matlab and Python, at university or work for example, used it really superficially, and therefore wouldn't have any interesting things to say about it. Neither do they add anything interesting to the respective ecosystems. I don't think it's the first interest of a new language to get this type of user, although of course in the long term you want to build tools that are easy to be picked up and used by a wide audience, and number of users is some indicator of that.
That's one of the reasons, though, why I never find the "how many people are using it" argument the most convincing when talking about the merits of a language. Because most people I've seen using R, Matlab and Python, at university or work for example, used it really superficially, and therefore wouldn't have any interesting things to say about it. Neither do they add anything interesting to the respective ecosystems. I don't think it's the first interest of a new language to get this type of user, although of course in the long term you want to build tools that are easy to be picked up and used by a wide audience, and number of users is some indicator of that.