Friction in general, or friction specific to Julia?

My view is that Julia (and R and Matlab etc) ecosystem's view is a "fancy calculator". It's hard to integrate to anything else, it almost actively tries to make e.g. unix-type workflow difficult (not much CLI, everything done in REPL, e.g. package management). Not as bad as e.g. R where its almost impossible to just run a file of code instead of doing a "workflow session".

Perhaps there is some disconnect in how different parties of the discussion see the whole thing. For me this sounds a lot like "you're holding it wrong". What background are you coming from and what languages/programming environments you are familiar with? I get the impression that you don't have much general purpose programming background and somehow tend to assume that people are using "wrong workflows" due to being just stupid or something. But this is how it comes off to me, I think you mean something else, but I don't know what that is.

My approach is: I want files with code and I want to run some of those with some kind of entry point. And preferably organize it to files or something like that. This is the usual setup for general purpose programming languages. In general purpose programming you rarely tend to stick solely to one language, any larger project is usually a mishmash of different stuff, e.g. glue code in python, tight loops in C, maybe some bash thrown around to do some more trivial chores.

This is the overall structure of practically all general purpose programming languages. This requires interfacing with these languages (often done in bash or something in unixy systems at least) and tools that work regardless of language (e.g. version control, grepping, Make etc). Julia (and R and Matlab etc) just plain refuse to even consider this as a valid approach. If you mention it somewhere, you tend to get some bizarre instant putdowns that provide no real rationale, i.e. "you're just holding it wrong".

In programming I tend to think the whole computer and its OS and so on as the programming tool. My impression is that for Julia folks Julia is something totally separate from anything else in the computer. But I don't understand why. Is it that its felt that changing syntax on the fly is too cognitively demanding or something? This is something that one gets used to very fast. And also tends to ease the IMHO weird hung-ups on syntax. In fact, I think Julia has made some (IMHO misguided) syntactic decisions because they just want to do something differently from Python just for the sake of being different. I find this totally senseless.

Us CLI folks are not even asking for much. Just a way to call a program with arguments and so that you don't have to do compile identical code every time you do something. That's it. Is that unreasonable? It wouldn't take anything away from people using REPLs and Notebooks. We don't want to change the language, the language is fine and that's why we'd like to use it but just cant because these paper cuts!

I've expanded on my rationale for my workflow and how Julia makes it really difficult e.g. here, where I admittedly started with too strong wordings out of frustration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26134970