Practical Julia

INTRODUCTION

I often feel that the American programmer would profit more from learning, say, Latin than from learning yet another programming language.

—Edsger Dijkstra

Julia is a fairly new programming language. It emerged into the public sphere in 2012 after two and a half years of research by four computer scientists at MIT. Julia’s creators explained why they needed to create a new language: they were “greedy.”

There were already languages that were fast, such as C and Fortran. They were well suited to writing programs that ran on giant supercomputers to simulate the weather or design airplanes. But their syntax was not the friendliest; ...