Why Julia?

Or: "Why should I waste my precious time learning yet another faddish programming language??"

David P. Sanders

Department of Physics, Faculty of Sciences

National University of Mexico (UNAM)

Twitter: @DavidPSanders

GitHub: dpsanders

Advantages of Julia

Julia is:

• high-level and easy to learn
• an interactive, dynamic language
• but Just-In-Time (JIT) compiled

So, Julia

• is fast (~2-3x C speed)

• solves the infamous two-language problem

• Most of the standard library is implemented in Julia itself

• "Users are developers"

Julia:

• has a sophisticated type system

• but it is not necessary to talk about types

• has multiple dispatch: functions specialised on the types of their arguments

• has sophisticated metaprogramming (macros) for generating code programatically
• allows the creation of domain-specific languages

Julia is:

• open source

• free

• MIT license (allows commercial use)

• developed by a worldwide community

Julia is:

• a new direction in scientific computing

Julia is:

• the future of scientific computing

Using Julia

• From the REPL (Read--Eval--Print Loop):

    julia

• Inside IJulia notebook (Jupyter notebook with Julia kernel):

    ipython notebook

• Inside an IDE, e.g. Juno

• In the cloud: JuliaBox

Getting help with Julia

• Julia manual

• julia-users mailing list

• List of resources for learning Julia

• Hands-on Julia: A hands-on tutorial covering the same ground as a series of exercises

Goal of the workshop

• Introduce some of the basic ideas that makes Julia different

• Think in a Julian way

• Based on examples