The article was written in 2016 (from the URL). Have some of the authors criticisms been addressed in the latest release? I know that startup time for Julia is now much faster (and also faster than my IPython profile from anaconda).
But the main point is that the critique is misguided in its generality. If the author cares about running many small scripts that each take a handful of milliseconds, then julia is just not the right tool for his job. No need to write overly general angry posts like "julia is slow"; instead write "julia has sluggish startup time". This is to some extent unavoidable, since julia has a quite heavy runtime (need to load llvm). For some workloads, bash / python / perl are more appropriate tools.
To give you an example, `$ time julia -e "print(5)"` gives me about 230 ms, compared to python 35 ms.
The language is designed for longer running programs that compute heavy stuff. And it performs very well at its intended use.
Personally, I do a lot of computational geometry in Julia and I really don't care so much about these kinds of small overheads since actual computation time is the dominant factor. I imagine if Julia was designed for scripting in Unix environments this would be a bigger deal, but I think most people in the Julia community care more about how to manage several gigabytes of data in RAM/cache and run some analysis quickly, e.g. composable multithreading in 1.3.