Julia shows great promise for biology and bioinformatics-related programming. It really blows the competition (Python, R) out of the water in terms of language design, but a lot of work is needed to catch up to the huge library advantage that's available in these languages.
I've set up a GitHub organization and Google Group for anyone interested to discuss how we can make Julia a viable platform for bioinformatics moving forward. Everyone is welcome, *especially*non-biologists/bioinformaticians. Biologists are not known for being the best programmers in the world, so we can definitely use input from skilled programmers as well as specialists in the field. - https://github.com/JuliaBio - https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/julia-bio