It's definitely closer to matlab than python, but it's closer to python than most mainstream programming languages. I ported ~20k lines of python code to Julia over a couple years manually, and for the most part could do line-by-line translations that worked (but weren't necessarily performant until I profiled and switched to using Julia idioms.)
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I'm always surprised when people describe Julia syntax as "Pythonic": Julia's syntax was clearly inspired by MATLAB rather than Python.
And that's a good thing, because Python+NumPy syntax is far more cumbersome than either Julia or MATLAB's.
You can see this at a glance from this nice trilingual cheat sheet:
https://cheatsheets.quantecon.org/
It's definitely closer to matlab than python, but it's closer to python than most mainstream programming languages. I ported ~20k lines of python code to Julia over a couple years manually, and for the most part could do line-by-line translations that worked (but weren't necessarily performant until I profiled and switched to using Julia idioms.)