honestly, parent had a use case in mind but it's ultra orthogonal with julia's goals. They're aiming at large numerical problems.. as I said above, if you need julia to make a quick one shot computation in a bash script loop, by all means use something else. But my bet is that anybody reading about julia is planning to do the heavy work inside of it, in which init time will probably be insignificant.

It's a bit annoying it's true, a well featured language with dynamic/repl appeal that is not in the ms launch time. But alas..