I really dislike the initialized syntax, but I don’t completely understand the rationale aside from making the intent to create an initialized object explicit. From my perspective, adding an extra argument for the sake of being explicit appears to be solving a problem that doesn’t really exist. It should be clear that x = Array{Float64}(n) does not contain sensible values because no values were given or implied by the statement. Adding the extra argument makes the syntax more verbose, annoying to type, and less readable, like Java.
I have been tripped up by the reference behavior of Julia a few times (see). This behavior could be made more explicit with x[i] = ReferenceTo(myObject). Unlike the case of the constructor, being explicit for references seems more justifiable. However, I would rather learn the default behavior of the language and have more readable code.