Not really - the discussion on the thread makes it sound like the kind of thing that comes up from time to time anyway. If I had to guess, I'd expect that it happened based on the mission of making something that was good enough to replace matlab, and going from the matlab interface people were used to and working backwards, rather than starting from a concept of what a language ought to be like and working forwards. Given my understanding of their aim and the kinds of things I have read about Matlab at http://abandonmatlab.wordpress.com/, I suspect that "close enough to matlab to have people jump ship" and "first-principles CompSci" language aren't really going to intersect very hard. Given the low popularity of some of the first-principles programming languages, that may be okay?

That said, I'm encouraged to see so many people interested in it and contributing to it. My perspective, though, is that of a C/Fortran HPC person who is cheering for things that will help people move to a more scalable coding environment. I was looking at Julia to see if it was an alternative to Octave for university users; the impression I got was that it was still too subject to change to recommend at this point.