I'm a researcher, doing lots of numerical work both professionally and in hobby projects. While Julia has a lot of technical merits, there are just some superficial, syntax-level design decisions that strongly rub me the wrong way: 1-based indexing (makes interfacing with C code hard), explicit begin/end (verbose & ugly) and column-major indexing (personal preference). I understand that these follow in the footsteps of Fortran (and matlab), but they always feel wrong to me. I grew up on C-based languages, and these things made working with R and Lua difficult whenever I had to interface with any non-numerical code (which somehow even most of my research projects ended up needing). It's a weird hill to die on, but I personally will avoid Julia (and actively discourage students from using it, in case I need to work with their code) for as long as I can due to these design decisions.