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Is Julia the Next Big Programming Language? MIT Thinks So, as Version 1.0 Lands (techrepublic.com)

Posted by msmash on from the how-about-that dept.

Julia, the MIT-created programming language for developers "who want it all", hit its milestone 1.0 release this month -- with MIT highlighting its rapid adoption in the six short years since its launch. From a report: Released in 2012, Julia is designed to combine the speed of C with the usability of Python, the dynamism of Ruby, the mathematical prowess of MatLab, and the statistical chops of R. "The release of Julia 1.0 signals that Julia is now ready to change the technical world by combining the high-level productivity and ease of use of Python and R with the lightning-fast speed of C++," says MIT professor Alan Edelman. The breadth of Julia's capabilities and ability to spread workloads across hundreds of thousands of processing cores have led to its use for everything from machine learning to large-scale supercomputer simulation. MIT says Julia is the only high-level dynamic programming language in the "petaflop club," having been used to simulate 188 million stars, galaxies, and other astronomical objects on Cori, the world's 10th-most powerful supercomputer. The simulation ran in just 14.6 minutes, using 650,000 Intel Knights Landing Xeon Phi cores to handle 1.5 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point operations per second).

2 of 386 comments (clear)

  1. Great.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Great... Just what we need... another language.. oh wait, that will need a new package manager.. and new frameworks.. and..
    screw it I'll just stick to C++.

  2. A good Matlab replacement, not the next big thing. by jma05 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If MIT had been having its way, we'd all be using Scheme.

    Julia is a better Octave (open source Matlab replacement) - good for computer scientists, but software engineers will not be interested. Question is, will the scientific community create enough definitive libraries to provide alternatives for Matlab toolboxes. Not enough seem to have attended the Octave party.

    Also, computer scientists don't define popular adoption of programming languages. Else, we'd be using Haskell/Scheme by now.