[short_sells_poo]

Uhh no. I do a lot of data analysis and if I have to dump stuff into text files every time I want to visualize something quickly then I'm going to go mental.

Simple plots take a fraction of a second in Python/R/Matlab. I feel like many people don't realize how crucial this is. Sub-second plotting makes working with data interactive. If it takes more than 5 seconds to produce simple plots, that's no longer interactive. Imagine if your debugger took half a minute to show you the value of a variable while trying to find a complex bug. You'd start pulling your hair out.

If in Julia it takes me half a minute at least (dumping to text file, reading it in somewhere else and then plotting it), Julia is going to remain firmly in the "check this language again in 2 years time if the plotting story has become sensible yet".

[improbable22]

It would be great if it were quicker. But right now, interactive use is pretty good, like 5ms for a simple plot. It's calling julia from the command line, and thus starting cold, which is more than 5s.