Here is my main gripe with Julia: They blatantly copy Matlab. The same is also true to a lesser degree of Python's numpy and matplotlib, but Julia goes the whole nine yards, by basically replicating the syntax and copying most of the numerical APIs including the indexing convention. I understand why they do it and I get that Matlab is hugely popular, I just wish that there was more creative energy in the Open Source world and not just rehashing of 20-40 year old designs.
This is not true. Indexing works very differently in julia than it does in Matlab. There is some overlap in function names, but less than you're implying, mostly in the names that everyone uses anyway (sin, cos, etc) and even where the names are the same, the API details often aren't. Ironically the number of overlapping method names has increased because Matlab has been copying method names from Julia in recent years. That said, Julia and Matlab are completely different languages, so I'd encourage you to look in one step further.
