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Julia Programming Language Receives $600k Donation
jones_supa writes: The Julia programming language has received a $600k donation from Moore Foundation. The foundation wants to get the language into a production version. This has a goal to create more efficient and powerful scientific computing tools to assist in data-driven research. The money will be granted over the next two years so the Julia Language team can move their core open computing language and libraries into the first production version. The Julia Language project aims to create a dynamic programming language that is general purpose but designed to excel at numerical computing and data science. It is especially good at running MATLAB and R style programs.
Not at all. Julia is just-in-time compiled to native code. You can basically get C-like performance in pure julia: http://julialang.org/benchmark...
There's also a powerful type system and lisp-style macros, along with support for parallel programming and lightweight threads, allowing you to do stuff like: https://gist.github.com/anj1/2...
(that's just a toy example, of course)
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Julia is aimed at people who do math-heavy problems (like computational physics), so that might be why you haven't heard of it. I think it's been on /. before.
I've never used Julia (the computing resources I have access to don't support Julia), but I've been following it, and the language looks pretty impressive: the ease of python/matlab with the speed of fortran/c. It's pretty impressive for a language you can use interactively.
It appears the ignorance level here on Slashdot has risen too an all time high. With the exception of one or two, none of the have any idea what they are talking about. People should be more careful about bashing things they know absolutely nothing about. Julia is a fairly kickass language and if you are a coder it should be on your radar -- up there with Go, Rust, Elixir, Clojure, etc. Having dabbled in most languages, I'd say it just might be the best of the lot, although I do dislike its module system.
There will be a big "ease of use" benefit to using Julia though. Julia requires to bindings to run C code (and soon C++ code, including all those fancy templates). That's because Julia doesn't suffer the two-language problem that every other language does. Julia types are LLVM types, and C types are LLVM types. Same with function calls. It's so simple and convenient.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Any language that purports to be a good for technical computing needs to get away from a forced base for indexing arrays. No, this is not a 0 or 1 problem. Arrays should be numbered from whatever the programmer specifies. The Pascal-type languages including Ada have this feature and it prevents many many errors. Maybe the $600K can buy this, but somehow I doubt it as this fixed-index-base is usually in the mindsets of the language's designers.