But it's an entirely 100% meaningless point of discussion though.

My peers and I use Julia to run numerical heavy code where the large majority of the time is spent inverting a large matrix to solve the equation Ax = b for x. It's a lot more complicated than this, but essentially it can be boiled down to this main equation. When my code takes hours, pushing onto days, to run, why should I care about 300 ms of startup time at all?

I stopped reading the article because their first point (the hello world benchmark) is entirely meaningless and is just noise in the wind. Their second point is a matter of personal opinion. After these two I didn't bother reading the rest.

I think a lot of people that set out to design languages don't start out with the top three design goals as, fast compile times, fast startup, and robust hooks for tooling. The problem is if you don't start out with those as primary design goals you're going to be totally hosed once they become a problem later.