Was this on a Unix or on Windows? This has been my experience too on Windows, both the initial startup of Julia and the loading of packages was pretty slow (this was in 0.4.2 I believe).
> It has macro, if only it has lisp syntax...
Honestly, it's a language whose audience is at least 50% non-professional-programmers (scientists, engineers, statisticians), so with a lisp-y syntax it would probably have died a sputtering death. There's a lot of other things to love about the language though, whether superficial (being able to say `2y + 3` or `if a ≠ b && e ∈ S` if you wanted to), practical (pretty good FFIs to C, C++, Python, MATLAB and R already, decent-sized and quickly growing package repo), theoretical (mutliple dispatch, the type system).
It was on Mac OS.
> Honestly...
Yes, the language has quite a few lovely features, that's why it makes me both love and hate it...so I chose to be away for a while and see how it develops in the future.
I would like a Lisp syntax too, and you can go into Lisp in Julia, since initially it used femtolisp written by Jeff Bezanson (one of the creators of Julia). I am not sure how much functionality is available from the Lisp prompt in the console. There's also a Lisp syntax package for it IIRC.
I am waiting for it to stabilize more, and then I'll revisit it. I like now that I have the choice of zero-indexing, since I am used to that from mathematics, C, and J, although APL gives a switch to choose between 0 or 1 indexing.
Tell that to 30 years of Autocad users.