> People often complain about the “Time To First Plot” (TTFP) in Julia. I personally have never minded it – by the time I am plotting something, I have done minutes of thinking so 20 seconds of compilation is nothing.
This amuses me. I hadn't really considered the author's perspective, and now I think it aligns with my take on it pretty well.
It is nevertheless im portant because a simple plot is a nice test if you are considering using a language for scientific computing. Criticism about plotting libraries quality is even more valid. I cannot believe that plotting an scatter plot of a few million points is so slow while AAA videogames render millions of pixels in real time.
On the long term? I think Julia is a better language than Python, Matlab or R for several reasons like modularity, package management and performance. But these are things that require at least 10 hours of use (to say something) instead of 10 minutes. With so many languages promising enlightent and transcendence to a next power level you cannot expect people to make that kind of investment.
Also, note that for people to whom plotting is really important, it's quite easy nowadays to just AOT compile your plotting library to your sysimage with PackageCompiler.jl [2] for instant plots.