I think most of the criticisms against Julia come from the fact that people see it as a Python competitor. In its actual state (even if the last version improved compile time a bit), it is not really usable as an exact python replacement (short scripts, opening a new interpreter each time).

However it is a revolution for the HPC crowd. If your program is supposed to run for several days on multiple nodes, 10 seconds of compilation is a negligible price to pay for a much cleaner and shorter code than Fortran or C/C++.

I've been using Julia for a few months for physics related simulations and it's just so much better than Fortran to work with.