I like Matlab. It’s the language I was taught at university (whether that’s good or bad is not up to discussion). When I started doing my PhD, however, I wanted to learn a real programming language, and I chose Julia, because it seems to be a very promising language to bet on.
Why Julia? As pointed out in the post, there is always the question of object-oriented vs. functional. And Julia happens to be in the middle. Using the ideas of multiple-dispatch, in my opinion, it provides the right tradeoff.
But then again… it seems that the choice of one’s go-to programming language seems to be similar to one’s choice of (non-)religion…