This is a rather unfair statement given that the first stable version of Julia was released only a year ago.

There are many approaches they could go, they could improve the live session approach (for example saving between sessions), which could also help people who repeatedly run scripts on the bash (for example with a --save-session flag). It wouldn't solve the very first plot but it would help all "first plot within the current run", which is probably most of the complaints.

The one that people would probably appreciate the most would be an AoT alternative (allowing you to create a runnable/linkable binary with a function/module without embedding the compiler, at the cost of the dynamic features such as eval).

Yea, but common lisp is also missing nearly all the numerical libraries I need like sparse matrices. Yes, I'm sure someone has a wrapper somewhere, but Julia has native support for all of that and is really nice. It also has much better support for a lot of things like plotting.