I am a data enthusiast, I have never thought about Julia as a viable option. R is the gold standard, Python has those C backed libraries.

I talked to couple of engineers about MATLAB vs Julia or X vs Julia. They said the company pays for whatever they do that includes computational time, error handling time and obviously paying for the software.

R is a horrible language. But is, indeed, the statistics gold standard. Mainly for the same reason as python, which is the only language worse than R. (Bcs PERL graciously died.) Both are piss slow (until you hit their C libraries.) But you can directly call python from Julia, so you get the libraries for free. Dunno about calling the R libraries, but that would be great.