whateverwhynot

I'm not the parent, but I faced exactly the same issue when I tried to switch to Julia from scilab. As for why I'd like to switch: Julia is a better language, it is way easy to run your script on a cluster and I've been bitten more than once by the two language problem... So Julia seems better for everything but for one of my most common use cases...

Well, with Julia it is time to first plot for every new session. So if your typical workflow is to start Julia and just do a single plot of the recently acquired data (quite common workflow in my field), Julia is an order of magnitude slower than python or scilab.