Why We Created Julia: A Manifesto for a New Programming Language
In this foundational blog post, the creators of the Julia programming language—Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, Viral B. Shah, and Alan Edelman—explain their motivation for developing a new tool for technical computing. Describing themselves as 'greedy' users of existing languages like Matlab, Lisp, Python, R, and C, they sought to eliminate the trade-offs inherent in each. Their goal was to create a single, open-source language that combines the speed of C with the dynamism of Ruby, the macro capabilities of Lisp, and the mathematical notation familiarity of Matlab. The authors detail their desire for a language that is both interactive and compiled, capable of high-performance parallel computing without the complexity of Java-based frameworks like Hadoop. They emphasize features such as multiple dispatch, optional type declarations, and ease of use for general programming and statistics. Announcing the initial release of Julia, the team invites other demanding programmers to test the language, which they claim already meets ninety percent of their rigorous requirements. This article serves as both a technical overview and a community call-to-action for the nascent Julia project.
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Why We Created Julia: A Manifesto for a New Programming Language
In this foundational blog post, the creators of the Julia programming language—Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, Viral B. Shah, and Alan Edelman—explain their motivation for developing a new tool for technical computing. Describing themselves as 'greedy' users of existing languages like Matlab, Lisp, Python, R, and C, they sought to eliminate the trade-offs inherent in each. Their goal was to create a single, open-source language that combines the speed of C with the dynamism of Ruby, the macro capabilities of Lisp, and the mathematical notation familiarity of Matlab. The authors detail their desire for a language that is both interactive and compiled, capable of high-performance parallel computing without the complexity of Java-based frameworks like Hadoop. They emphasize features such as multiple dispatch, optional type declarations, and ease of use for general programming and statistics. Announcing the initial release of Julia, the team invites other demanding programmers to test the language, which they claim already meets ninety percent of their rigorous requirements. This article serves as both a technical overview and a community call-to-action for the nascent Julia project.
JuliaLang - The Julia programming language