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).