I want to love Julia so much, but it's always something. The funky handling of scope in the REPL was the latest off-putting thing for me, but maybe I should give it a try again...
If you don't like MATLAB your probably not the correct audience. It's for people needing to do data analysis, simulation or control and have a lot of money to pay for the libraries. The things software developers hate about it tend to be what makes it better for statistics and modelling. Math works even suggest it isn't appropriate for making software as the sell simulink coder that turns simulink models into c++ code.