I personally do care for my concrete usage pattern.

This is my use case: A long shell script that does a lot of things. At some point, inside a loop that runs hundreds of times, it needs to solve a couple of small linear systems and plot a simple graph. There's hundreds of png graphs, that are then combined into a video sequence. Right now, the computation is done by calling octave (inside the loop) and then gnuplot (to create the actual graph from the octave computed data points). I would like to replace each call to octave+gnuplot to a single call to julia. Yet, this would make my script run in a few hours instead of a few seconds, because for this usage pattern all plots are first plots

Before you suggest that I should rewrite the whole thing in julia, maybe you are right but

1) it would take me a few weeks that I don't have

2) that's not my point. A good tool is a tool that can be used for purposes that it was not intended to, like this. If the time to first plot in julia was a millisecond instead of 10 seconds, then julia would be a much better tool.