From my understanding Julia is closer to metal than R. This means the semantics are much more specific than R, and the syntax is more consistent/rigid.

For example, plotting in R always baffled me.

plot(x, y, col=..., col.name=...)

In this case, col.name is literally just a symbol. But in another context col.name is the data with index 'name' stored in col. Or something, it's been a while.

R seems to have a lot of these 'special contexts' that A. make understanding and writing code much quicker and B. reward familiarity over intuition. One R line can be 100 in Julia, and both compile to 80 machine instructions, for example.

I'd say if you can agree with others on what R code does and you're comfortable with R, then use R. If you need to build something performant with many domains, then Julia is a great language.