Sadly, this is very true. Yeah Julia is fast, but not as fast as python and matlab in the REPL and quick analysis work. I can get going with data analysis and plotting far faster for exploratory work due to the zero precompilation overhead in those languages, where as in Julia this overhead is brutal. Julia people will probably down-vote this, but sadly, as an interactive language this is it's Achilles heel. I have to explain to people why the code is taking so long to show up due to JIT et al., and non-experts don't understand that this is just an initial overhead.