I should add that one of the things I really like about Julia is having closures and higher-order functions, and also lambda. Unlike other Schemers switching to Julia, I don't miss not having tail recursion (if I was writing the kind of code that's more naturally recursive, I likely would have used Scheme / Lisp to start with). About the only thing I have a hard time wrapping my head around is writing macros in Julia -- CL-style macros are somehow a lot easier to think about. But this is likely to change with more experience. Also, I haven't needed Julia macros very oten.