Julia seems like it's meant to be friendly to people who know MATLAB, Python, and R (even Fortran). R and Python are really comfortable with working with data science and that's what Julia is geared toward. I have no experience with MATLAB, though. Julia's programming "world" may indeed be a different programming world than C programmers.

I'm not defending Julia per se. I've been patiently observing from the sidelines to see how the language shapes up.