It will be very hard to displace Matlab out of certain very important niches. For example, across both academia and industry, Matlab is king in control systems design/analysis thanks to its toolboxes, Simulink, and (at least in industry), its autocoder. Matlab is used to generate the flight controls software on a lot of today's aircraft. In a number of other engineering disciplines, Mathworks has been astute in developing toolboxes that answer the needs of industry. There will probably have to bit quite a bit more paid development of Julia and its ecosystem to deal Matlab death blows in industry. I hope for it to happen sooner rather than later, as the 70s-era Matlab language and Mathworks' exorbitant license fees are holding things back.
Agreed. The academic part of my industry is starting to use Julia at the National Labs level, but virtually all University and National Lab code is prototyped in Matlab and textbook examples are Matlab. So it has a lot of momentum with researchers who never learned Python, Julia...etc. I don't think Octave or Scilab are seriously used anywhere unfortunately. When I ask, I'm the only one who has heard of them.
It is a better language indeed. Too bad that their IDE options are not par with it. Julia REPL is just that — a REPL. Julia IDEs are just editors for writing code. MATLAB integrated environment, where you can see all variables immediately, is what makes it popular; why not imitate it?
This is what held me back for a long while too, but Juno (the Atom plug-in) seems to finally have all the features I was missing in Julia compared to the Matlab IDE, including a decent variable inspector.
For what it's worth, the Spyder IDE for python imitates many features of MATLAB and I don't find myself missing much. The data viewer in particular is great.
I haven't used Julia's Juno yet, but have used Python's Spyder and found the combination of editor, REPL, variable inspector, and documentation pane to be great. I can't remember if Spyder can also show charts or if that has to come from the code itself if that makes sense.