I've been porting over a bunch of my old academic Matlab to Julia. It's obviously nowhere as close to Matlab syntax as Octave is, but it's a lot closer than Python. YMMV of course, but there are enough similarities that a decent proportion of my code has worked after pretty easy find/replace changes like switching array indexing from parentheses to square brackets. And I usually end up with something that runs about 2x faster than the original Matlab, which is always nice.