I know R and have used Octave. I started learning Julia this morning after a physicist recommended it to me after he switched from python. I used Jupyter&#x2F;Julia to simulate a neuron as a practice exercise. This is my experience as a beginner:<p>1. The static typing makes a big and positive difference. Its nice having a statically typed repl.<p>2. The documentation is good.<p>3. Using unicode symbols and \mu style tab completion is nice, especially in Jupyter where you can use the same symbols in latex style equations.<p>4. The base install is a bit bare. It would be nice if batteries were included - distributions and dataframes in particular.<p>5. R uses 1 based indexing and it was no shock to see this in Julia.<p>6. I had no problems with the mix of lisp and C++ in the source code. The lisp implementation is beautiful and worth a read.<p>Generally, I was shocked to see a blog post like this given that my first day with Julia was so positive.