Great points. To add to the second point, much of the surface syntax also is also similar to Matlab/Octave/Scilab, in addition to function names being similar. Of course, this similarity is only superficial and by design.
That (and not having daft slow loops is) what got me into Julia from octave. I tried it a while back and the biggest issue was the in equivalency of array{n} and array{n,1} now that that's been fixed, it's awesome.
Parallelization in Julia is still a little scary though, I'm waiting a bit before delving into that.
Parallelization in Julia is still a little scary though, I'm waiting a bit before delving into that.