There is an interesting story here that I wish was told in more details somewhere on the internet (currently I just have some partial guesses from listening to JuliaCon talks). It seems some of these (awesome) properties arose very organically after experimentation, not by having a committee of theorists define the properties the language should have. This has led to a couple of minor inconsistencies to be ironed out, however computer scientists (like the authors of this paper) then decided to study and formalize Julia and uncovered gems like this (I guess they are gems particularly if you care about formal treatments).
I am certain I am somewhat wrong in this description, but I would love to see a writeup of the whole story and how both sides (the devs and the scientists) lived through it.
You're quite right about the organic nature. The story of how we get together could be better told by our prof, Jan Vitek, I guess. But in a nutshell, one of his older students (Ben, also an author of the paper) was once on a plane with some other student, Jean, from MIT, where Julia was developed, and Ben got interested and told Jan… Then there were occasional meetings with Julia devs (Jeff Bezanson in particular) that turned out to be super nice and inviting people. I should add, we're all from Northeastern University in Boston, and that's close to MIT... All in all, we decided PL academia should learn about this "organic gem".
I am certain I am somewhat wrong in this description, but I would love to see a writeup of the whole story and how both sides (the devs and the scientists) lived through it.