jlpkg

I find the flexibility of being able to setup and switch environments from within the REPL very enabling, and the Python approach of using the command-line shell feels kinda messy and cobbled together to me. (I felt this way about the Python approach before I even came across Julia, by the way.) That said, there is a command-line utility jlpkg [1] that makes package management available from the shell. It's not very widely used, but maybe it suits your needs. Although, the way you phrased > it still required you to issue commands into the repl to setup your packages makes me think maybe you didn't know about the Pkg mode in the REPL, and assumed you had to do everything with commands like `Pkg.add("DataFrames"); Pkg.update()` and such? If so, there's a package management mode to the REPL you can access with the ] key, which is kind of its

Julia's package management was inspired by Cargo, afaik. What did you find off-putting about it, what would make it more Cargo-like? I've heard from people who are not used to the REPL wanting to do things from the shell directly, if that's the problem, there's the jlpkg tool [1]. [1] https://github.com/fredrikekre/jlpkg

You can expose it as a CLI tool if you wish: https://github.com/fredrikekre/jlpkg

Check out https://github.com/fredrikekre/jlpkg. It does pretty much exactly what you are describing.

Alternatively, you could run it with --compile=min and --optimize=0 to minimize latency at the cost of runtime performance (making it comparable to Python). jlpkg does this to speed up package installation: https://github.com/fredrikekre/jlpkg https://live.juliacon.org/talk/N39HSX