I am in about the same position as @vphom - I just started to learn Julia, and I have a small application or two, which I would probably like to port from Python and further develop it in Julia. “Probably” in my case because whether we will really need the applications depends on many circumstances.
So in one case I started with the Python application and tried to port the most computational expensive part of it to Julia, than call it from Python through pyjulia. That actually worked on one of the computers, while on another one I couldn’t properly install it. Thus I could port the module function by function and check results against the original program.
To the list of the things to be prepared for (@frtps , thank you for your post), I would like to add one more - the scoping rules as discussed here: Dicussion on scoping rules . The nasty thing is that in many cases your try blocks and loops would work in Julia just as in Python - because you just happend to initialize the corresponding variable in some way.
As a general remark - from my recent experience: Julia may look familiar on the first glance, but pretty soon you will find out you need to invest time in reading at least a big part of the manual anyway.