[ssivark]

Julia is a fantastic language and ecosystem, but I don't think it's the right thing to compare Mathematica against. As a language, Mathematica's computational model and strengths are closer to Lisp, IMHO. As a "computational system" their goals might be similar, but I can't fathom what Stephen Wolfram actually aims at, for Mathematica.

Julia, btw, is actually a language you could potentially know inside out. The discipline to keep the language simple enough that LLVM can generate fast code means that it's not hard to understand and there aren't many gotchas. On top of that, the community discussions (on Github issues and the Discourse forum) are very interesting and enlightening to read through.