[martinsmit]

As someone who does work in similar domains as yourself, I find that making a main function which contains all of the code I want to be reproducible is a good way to achieve both high speed and running code in a clean environment.

Writing .jl files in VSCode and sending code to the integrated REPL with shift-return for playing around is great and then when I want to run code properly I just comment out my testing code, wrap my important code in a main() function (which is sometimes everything apart from the imports) and then just make sure that I'm not referring to any variables or function methods defined that are now commented. This is made relatively easy as VSCode will immediately complain about possible method errors.

It's not a perfect substitution for having fast startup and when I go back to Python or R for things like the holy grail called Tidyverse then it feels like a weight off my back, but the benefit of doing things the Julia way is that your code has a clear starting point and it helps readability as you can see what every script is supposed to do.