I gave up on Julia at 0.6 for these reasons a couple of years ago, before giving it another try at 1.1

Unfortunately, while the startup time has improved, I still find the JIT compiler overhead makes it unsuitable for most shorter scripts - the sort of thing where I would normally use python or R. Taking a few minutes to produce the first plot of the day while julia recompiles the plotting packages dependency tree is just a pain.

Edit: After a fresh install of 1.1, I found loading the Plotly package takes 4 seconds from a fresh repl, while the first plot with the Plotly.jl backend (plot(rand(5,5),linewidth=2,title="My Plot")) takes 14s, and subsequent plots take less than 1s on my computer. This is a marked improvement on 0.6, which is where my few minutes came from. Couldn't get PyPlot to work.