For what it's worth, I tried and failed to convert my team of scientists/programmers (heavy on the science; not so much on the programming) to Julia from MATLAB/IDL/C++ for a project we were kicking off ca. 1 year ago.

It's a really, really nice language that I find more consistent and easier to grok than MATLAB, but the deciding factor was the lack of the equivalent of MATLB toolboxes with all of their pre-rolled code that made our development as fast as it was.

Edit: I should have mentioned: the Julia add-on packages are multiplying quickly, and are starting to look mature! http://pkg.julialang.org/ I'm looking forward to them overtaking Mathworks on this front too.