In R, starting from any working directory, I can do
setwd(\"~/Desktop\")
and this is consistent with how my linux distribution
The idiom is just different as you can see from the source. If you invoke cd() without arguments, it defaults to the home directory. The function homedir() can be used to prepend the home directory.
julia> homedir()
"/Users/jeffw"
julia> cd("/")
julia> pwd()
"/"
julia> cd()
julia> pwd()
"/Users/jeffw"
Combining things
julia> cd("$(homedir())/Desktop")
julia> pwd()
"/Users/jeffw/Desktop"