I suppose because Matlab is a language designed for math, compared to C which is designed as a low level systems language. Julia would be more or less an open s

I suppose because Matlab is a language designed for math, compared to C which is designed as a low level systems language. Julia would be more or less an open source equivalent of Matlab. It seems that the code was translated from Fortan to C, however which makes sort of explains it since it would be fairly trivial to translate from Fortran to C. Code written in C with a lot of math in it would become quite convoluted and tedious to work with in comparison. Apart from that you probably have a lot of useful tooling with Julia and Matlab. So if anyone wants to start working on rocket science using computer programming, Matlab or Julia would be worth looking into.