Comment by bluenose69

I don't think I've ever seen an R library() take more than about a second, and usually the action is complete as my finger is starting to raise from the 'return' key. When I tried "using Plots" in julia, it took several tens of seconds the first time, and several seconds in subsequent sessions. So, slower than R, but not terribly so. I suspect the real advantage of Julia is that it lets the analyst stick to a single language, without (as in the R case) having to write time-consuming components in C, C++, or Fortran.