Practical Julia

2LANGUAGE BASICS

Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things.

—Flora Lewis

Sometimes people new to programming ask why there are so many computer languages. They all have different syntaxes. Some use braces and semicolons, like C and JavaScript; some use whitespace, like Python; some are notorious for a proliferation of parentheses, like the Lisp family; and some use keywords, like Julia.

However, differences in syntax are not the real reason. With experience, variations in language punctuation become trivialities. It’s also true that some languages are faster ...