Quite different. I think a good way to imagine Julia is as a science-flavoured Go with dynamic types.
Well, no, that's not quite right. Really, it's more like someone took Matlab and made it a real general-purpose language, and built it close enough to C to be generally fast, not just fast at a few things. Matlab actually has more in common with Clojure, being a JVM language.
Matlab is not a JVM language, it just has some ability to call Java built in, and some of the IDE is in Java implementation. Launch Matlab without booting a JVM: matlab -nojvm
Well, no, that's not quite right. Really, it's more like someone took Matlab and made it a real general-purpose language, and built it close enough to C to be generally fast, not just fast at a few things. Matlab actually has more in common with Clojure, being a JVM language.