Agreed. Julia seems like it could really become a competitor to MATLAB (unless you rely on fancy toolboxes). I think their blog has some nice posts:

http://julialang.org/blog/

especially these seem very interesting:

http://julialang.org/blog/2013/03/julia-tutorial-MIT/

It's also a huge plus that they can pretty much call any python inline:

http://nbviewer.ipython.org/url/jdj.mit.edu/~stevenj/IJulia%...

So we have the fall back python libraries and can do plotting etc..