Boot times still aren't ideal, but I find it takes about .1 seconds to launch a julia repl now. First time to plot is still a bit painful due to JIT overhead, but that's coming down very aggressively (there will be a big improvement in 1.5, the next release with differential compilation levels for different modules), and we now have PackageCompiler.jl for bundling packages into your Sysimage so they don't need to be recompiled every time to you reboot julia.
I also think the tooling is quite strong, we have ana amazingly powerful type system and I would classify discovering multiple dispatch as a religious experience.
Boot times still aren't ideal, but I find it takes about .1 seconds to launch a julia repl now. First time to plot is still a bit painful due to JIT overhead, but that's coming down very aggressively (there will be a big improvement in 1.5, the next release with differential compilation levels for different modules), and we now have PackageCompiler.jl for bundling packages into your Sysimage so they don't need to be recompiled every time to you reboot julia.
I also think the tooling is quite strong, we have ana amazingly powerful type system and I would classify discovering multiple dispatch as a religious experience.