why ruby "of all things"? i've only dabbled a little in julia, but it definitely has a lot of the things i like about ruby, mixed in with a lot of the things i like about racket.
> The normal thing today is comparing Julia to R, Matlab and Python.
I'm on the same page as you, though. I've never written R or any Matlab, but when Julia was still new, I remember seeing an example that it was a language that didn't use S-expressions, yet had as potent of macro and meta-programming abilities as if it did. Seemed like it'd be wonderful to work in.
Most of the time multiple dispatch and a what really help abstracting your code and reuse.