I don't know Ruby (boo hiss on me!) but I find Julia very easy to read and write. It's not production ready (in my opinion) yet, and I tried to use it at work -

I don't know Ruby (boo hiss on me!) but I find Julia very easy to read and write. It's not production ready (in my opinion) yet, and I tried to use it at work - and found I couldn't because of some of the glitches in the windows implementation (specifically loading images in the case I tried, where it used to back door to ImageMajik and this took 20 seconds to bring in a gif). It does seem very good as a glue language. I think that the good thing about it is that it is really nice to write with very powerful syntax and semantics but also very fast (until you hit a corner case...) I think that the corner cases will get rubbed out one at a time in the next year or so, and what will be left will be truely impressive. The fear I had was that interest would wane before it took off, but the libary growth in the last 6mths makes me increasingly confident that the Julia community is robust enough to deliver.