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The big question for me is whether Julia will be able to maintain its "purity" as it gains adoption.

R probably started out "beautiful" and "thought out" but has lost that edge with years of community driven development. It's also what make it so damn useful -- you can pretty much find anything on CRAN, often multiple implementations of it.

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R is actually one of the most pure languages out there; it basically says "I have vectors; they can have missing values, be nested, and can have other vectors as attributes. And I have functions with lexical scoping. Now go and build the rest as you like." So people did this, one better, one worse -- but the core and beautiful stuff here is that all those approaches will work together and just do the job.

Sorry, no. Even the core S language would not be described by very many users as "beautiful" according to modern standards.

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