Julia is exactly the same. Anything people would use to write shell scripts, I would use Julia with instead and I have used many languages for this purpose: Python, Ruby and Go. Out of al these I find Julia to be the best language.
The fact that Julia is free, open source, available on all platforms and is good at text and shell stuff means it has a sort of Trojan horse ability to get into more wide usage.
I am not a scientific programmer, yet I use Julia for a whole bunch of stuff and find it very productive. Here are some examples of stuff I have written in Julia:
- Custom scripts for Swift and Objective-C app compilations.
- Various file conversion utilities.
- Code generators based on custom DSLs. Due to Julia's support for macros writing a DSL is easier in Julia than in Python, Go or whatever "script" alternative I might have used. - Various parsers. I find Julia very good at writing parsers. I have used this to create tools for manipulating user interface definition files for a larger C++ project.
- Editor plugins. I have written plugins in Julia for e.g. TextMate although I guess it would have worked on Sublime and other editors as well.
I cannot imagine anyone would have had a nice experience writing any of this stuff in R or Matlab.
Julia may never get big as a Web programming language, but for scientific programming, data science, data scraping/munging/preparation, scripting make up quite a large field together.
Julia may have some slow startup due to JITing but I found my Julia scripts to run much faster than the shell scripts they replaced and the Julia code was easier to read and faster to write.
With a language like Julia, it's going to be a chicken-and-egg problem - so long as people are using it mostly for scientific computing, the stable and well-maintained libraries for it are mostly going to be about that.