To expand upon this: I love Lisp, but good array syntax is tremendously helpful when you're doing scientific programming (at least of a certain stripe). You want to be able to do things like A[1, 2:6] to get elements two through six of the first row of A. The great joy of Julia (for me, at least) it makes arrays easy to deal with, but also brings all sorts of wonderful Lisp-y features.
I understand, but those are hardly two conflicting things, are they ?
Julia does seem to use some sort of Scheme in their implementation, wouldn't it make sense to allow S-expressions in the language (or is it allowed ?) ? Or maybe, the designers/implementors felt that it wasn't necessary ?
In a strict sense they are, I think: A[1, 2:6] could writtenas an S-expression---something like (getindex A 1 (range 2 6)), maybe, but it is not in itself an S-expression. (I think: I'm relying on Wikipedia for the precise definition of "S-expression".)
Your broader point stands, though: I can't see any reason that one couldn't have S-expressions + syntactic sugar (not that I know anything at all about designing programming languages).
My guess is that it's a sociological thing? As scott_s pointed out, people expect something Matlab-like. From http://julialang.org/ : "Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. "
The parser and AST lowering is written in scheme. I can't really comment on all the design decisions involved, since I joined the project at a later stage, but personally I'm rather happy with it and I think especially people new to programming have an easier time with a syntax like this than with S-expressions.
