Lispers might not like that it's not a Lisp, but I remember Luke Tierney also making a statement to the effect that the statisticians have spoken and they don't prefer the Lisp syntax.

So Julia is a happy middle ground - MATLAB-like syntax with metaprogramming facilities (i.e., macros, access to ASTs). Its canonical implementation is JIT, but the community is working on allowing creation of medium-sized binaries (there has been much effort to reduce this footprint).