I relate to your concerns and desire for a native Julia GUI language.
To have an application to (easily) analyze data, you need a simple way to get some user input. This is in contrast to writing some program statements to specify the analysis you want to run.
Here is an example input box from SAS JMP:
Here the user can drag & drop columns from a data table into various roles, then press “OK” and the analysis is done and the output produced.
JMP has its own language, JSL, which includes allows one to program custom input windows like the one above. It’s user friendly in that it auto-arranges and sizes things automatically for the user (never need to specify box sizes or positions in pixels, for example). If you want to see details, it’s covered in Chapter 11 of the JMP Scripting Guide.
It would be nice to be able to do something similar in Julia.*
Without that, I’ve often found to let the best tool for the job do the heavy lifting. Writing your own input code is a pain in the keister – and it’s usually not due to the input, it’s due the need to support editing.
Often a good tool that already does that for you is . . . Excel. Use Excel as your front-end, then press a button to invoke Julia to grab the input and go.
From this thread, I’ve also learned that perhaps web forms would be a good way to go as well.
*JMP supports calling Python, R, and Matlab code. Waiting for the day it can call Julia code … then I could write the interface in JMP, then call Julia.