It's not such a clear-cut distinction. There do exist languages like Matlab (and possibly R, I'm not as familiar with it) that intrinsically have or historicall

It's not such a clear-cut distinction. There do exist languages like Matlab (and possibly R, I'm not as familiar with it) that intrinsically have or historically had a lot of limitations in them, that prevented them from being general purpose languages. If Python/Java/C are on one side of the spectrum as clear general purpose languages, Matlab would be on the other side as a niche-specific language. Julia is not (yet) completely on either side, but is pretty close to the general purpose side - the language itself is fully general purpose and very well designed for that, but the ecosystem around it grew to be science-focused (though not science-exclusive by any means), and the standard library having things like `LinearAlgebra` and `SparseArrays` puts the focus in that direction too. That could easily turn out to be a temporary situation though. Rails turned Ruby into a major webdev language, numpy/scipy pushed Python into the scicomp space which nobody would have predicted at the time, and it's quite possible some best-in-class package ushers Julia into new and unpredictable spaces. The language leaves the possibility open, and it's too early to tell where the ecosystem will take it.