Julia vs C#

Julia runs almost as fast as (and in fact in some cases faster than) C code.

Dynamic and high level, but does not isolate the user from properly thinking about types. Can do explicit type signatures which is great for teaching structured thinking.

Out of the box Julia has a very good Read-Eval-Print-Loop, which both completes functions and types, as well as completion based on history of previous statements. It integrates well with the shell and has an excellent online help system.

Julia code is easy to read and avoid a lot of unnecessary special symbols and fluff. It uses newline to end statements and "end" to end blocks so there is no need for lots of semicolons and curly braces. It is regular in that unless it is a variable assignment, function name always comes first. No need to be confused about whether something is a method on an object or a free function.

Unlike Python and Ruby, since you can annotate the types a function operates on, you can overload function names, so that you can use the same function name for many data types. So you can keep simple descriptive function names and not have to invent artificial function names to separate them from the type they operate on.

The Julia language is written in itself to a much larger extent than most other languages, so a budding programmer can read through the depths of the standard library and learn exactly how things work all the way down to the low-level bit-twiddling details, which can be englightening.

Julia has built in n-dimensional arrays similar in functionality as Python's numpy.

You can have multiple functions with the same name, but doing different things depending on function arguments and argument types.

Julia requires no boilerplate code – a beginner needs to write only the parts they care about. This combined with the REPL provides the best learning experience available.

Julia provides a high level of abstraction, making platform-independent programming trivial and easing the learning curve.

You can perform operations on scalars, for example 2^2 or [1, 2, 3].^2.

Julia allows you to edit Julia code in the language itself and write powerful macros. It is a great introduction to metaprogramming features

The Julia REPL allows quickly testing how some code behaves and gives access to documentation and package management immediately in the REPL.

.NET offers rich functionality.

The Visual Studio IDE offers one of the best development environments. The Community Edition and Visual Studio Code can be used for free.

Can be designed visually with the Visual Studio designer for traditional Windows forms, WPF, or Web forms.

Lot's of tools and libraries available.

With Xamarin for Mobile (ios, android),
with .net core asp for server (linux, windows),
with .net core for desktop (windows, mac),
with mono for desktop (windows, linux),
with blazor for web client with webassembly.

However, it is not considered top for any of those categories, but it is top choice for Windows desktop with .net framework and top choice for Unity.

.net 5 will unify frameworks similar to JVM (just one).

Runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows.

Constant updates and bug fixes to many popular frameworks, as well as great first-party support from Microsoft. This can be a con as well in certain circumstances.

Being a C like language counts in favor for it as a general purpose programming language, given the ease of using existing skills to pick up this language easily.

There are other superior languages that could be used as a general purpose, such as: F#, Haskell, but the complexity of those languages, being functional, make them strange to the usual C Syntax.

C# is better than C whenever garbage collection, Objects, classes, data access, are needed. But C is going to be the choice when hardware access and performance are paramount.