I don't think Julia has aped Matlab's conventions as such [1]. There are languages that have done this (Scilab, Octave) but those were developed as Matlab clone

I don't think Julia has aped Matlab's conventions as such [1]. There are languages that have done this (Scilab, Octave) but those were developed as Matlab clones. Julia isn't a Matlab clone. No, it's more like Julia has taken "Matlab: The Good Parts" as well as practices from modern languages and created a new language with them that is morphologically familiar to Matlab users, yet is an entirely new design. [1] Except for 1-indexing, but that was a carryover from Fortran, which in turn adopted it from linear algebra convention and it seriously isn't that bad. I wrote production Matlab for 12-years and 1-indexing was the least of my troubles. It's a theoretical polarizing issue like Python's use of whitespace, but in practice it's not an issue.