I don't think this is entirely accurate. When you develop software, you don't repeatedly unload and load your dependencies (which is what causes Julia's startup time). You probably only develop one package, which you then reload one in a while. That causes very little lag in Julia. Similarly when working interactively, there you only suffer from startup time when you launch your session and use your heavy dependencies the first time.
Also, for what it's worth, I recreated his benchmarks in Julia and found a startup time of 5-6 seconds on my laptop. Not nothing, but compared to the time any FASTQ-processing operation usually takes, it's insignificant.
Julia' compile time latency does prevent you from e.g. calling a short Julia script in a loop, or from using Julia scripts that both have large dependencies and do very short-timed tasks. But I find that to be not very common in my workflow - especially since I usually don't use Julia as a small glue layer between C programs the way Python is often used.
Also, for what it's worth, I recreated his benchmarks in Julia and found a startup time of 5-6 seconds on my laptop. Not nothing, but compared to the time any FASTQ-processing operation usually takes, it's insignificant.
Julia' compile time latency does prevent you from e.g. calling a short Julia script in a loop, or from using Julia scripts that both have large dependencies and do very short-timed tasks. But I find that to be not very common in my workflow - especially since I usually don't use Julia as a small glue layer between C programs the way Python is often used.