Certainly using Julia with Jupyter gets you much closer to having a reasonable IDE, though you'll have to be comfortable with cell-mode debugging instead of breakpoints and single stepping. I don't personally use it but I'm intrigued and would love to switch away from Matlab if there were reasonable feature parity or an alternate model that seemed reasonable for most basic tasks.
I'd really like to have a replacement for cell arrays and struct arrays, that have some of the convenient features of those structures. I know you can get this with lists of dictionaries in python, for example, but it's not the same.