Not at all. I've done a lot of C, Matlab, Perl, Ruby and R, although I've also dabbled in Java, JavaScript, C++, Scala and Python. Definitely a polyglot of "pragmatic" languages. Julia was influenced most strongly by Lisp (Scheme in particular), Matlab, C, Python, Ruby and Perl. If you (or anyone else reading this) have questions looking through the manual, drop an email to the julia-users@googlegroups.com list, or me personally.