Julia seems like an easy transition for any Matlab programmer. The syntax is very similar and the built-in package manager makes finding new libraries way easie

Julia seems like an easy transition for any Matlab programmer. The syntax is very similar and the built-in package manager makes finding new libraries way easier. And apart from that, performance is awesome. If having an IDE is an issue, Julia also has one (http://forio.com/julia/index http://forio.com/julia/index) which looks a lot like Matlab.