Julia has a heavy Lisp heritage. If you want a clearer comparison, see Dylan. On the topic of Lisp, Julia's parser is written in a custom version of Scheme called femtolisp.

Perhaps, as well as Dylan, it's worth referencing another Lisp system, T, that pioneered fast dynamic language implementations on the typical Unix workstation-type hardware of the time, and was of interest for research computing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_(programming_language)

(T has some historical interest just as the original implementation language of the Yale Haskell compiler.)