Why Julia?

Or: DIRHTLYAPL

"Do I Really Have To Learn Yet Another 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 interpreted, but (JIT-) compiled
• is high-level and easy to learn

• designed so easy to make fast from the start
• is fast (~2--3x C speed)

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
• allow the creation of domain-specific languages

Julia:

• most of the standard library is implemented in Julia itself

• avoids the infamous "two-language problem"

• "users are developers"

Using Julia

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

    julia

• Inside IJulia (IPython interface with Julia kernel):

    ipython notebook --profile julia

• Inside an IDE, e.g. LightTable + Jewel + Juno/Jupiter; Julia Studio

Getting help with Julia

• Julia manual: http://julia.readthedocs.org/en/latest/manual

• julia-users mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/julia-users