yes. Julia looks like a quality language but suffers the usual new kid on teh block hassles - very few packages so you have to spend too long rolling your own.
mmap is a package that let me create a fast db from scratch in a day. ggplot, lattice and all the charting routines are a joy to work with.
I'm interested in random forests today, and I bet there's a package that links to the standard libraries whatever they are. This is also probably true for python, but Julia you'd have to build the API.