Comment by KenoFischer

Happy to address these points:

  - Startup performance/memory usage

Yes, we are definitely very acutely aware of these. Julia is not currently optimized for frequently run short scripts. That's the price on pays for having to bring up the entire runtime system (initializing the compiler, RNG, external libraries etc). The good news is that there will be a solution to this soon, which is to statically compile your julia program. The area where this really comes up for most people using is package load times. We're very actively working on making that faster.

  - Syntax

A little subjective, so not sure how much I can say here. I can say that I'm not a huge fan of our multi-line comment syntax. It's not entirely clear what a better syntax would be though (the original issue on this had some suggestions, but some of them were worse).

  - One-based indexing

I think there has been plenty said on this topic, though interestingly this is one of the only times I've seen the argument made in a way that I actually agree with. That said, I do think there is an easy way to deal with this though. For packages that needs arrays of indices, it would be quite easy to define an `IndexArray` type that does the translation automatically.

  - String Formatting

Yep, you're right, it's a mess. It'll have to be cleaned up.

  - Unsafe C Interface

There's two projects (Clang.jl and Cxx.jl) which can help with this. The former automatically generates ccall definitions for you, the latter just parses the header and generates the call directly.

  - Slowing down in development

I'm really not sure where that impression comes from. Perhaps it is that we're adding fewer features, but rather working on cleaning up existing features. Also, I personally at least have been doing a lot of work outside of base (particularly on the debugger). Not sure. Would love to know.