Julia is a new programming language for the scientific community. Its main advantage over Matlab, R, etc. is its speed. Although it is still under heavy developement I would say it is worth taking a look at. There are already some interesting libraries available. Some of them come from the R community (DataFrames, GLM, ...), others are wrappers for existing libraries (NLOpt, PyPlot, ...) and because of its speed and at the same time high level of abstraction, there will soon be coming packages that do not exist in other languages. For those who are interested in trying it out I wrote a small Gist that compares the syntax of Julia, Octave and NumPy. You can find a very motivating introduction here.