Julia: a new language for technical computing
From the post:
Julia is a new open-source language for high-performance technical computing, created by Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, Viral Shah and Alan Edelman and first announced in February. Their motivation for creating a new language was, they say, “greed”:
We are power Matlab users. Some of us are Lisp hackers. Some are Pythonistas, others Rubyists, still others Perl hackers. There are those of us who used Mathematica before we could grow facial hair. There are those who still can’t grow facial hair. We’ve generated more R plots than any sane person should. C is our desert island programming language.
We love all of these languages; they are wonderful and powerful. For the work we do — scientific computing, machine learning, data mining, large-scale linear algebra, distributed and parallel computing — each one is perfect for some aspects of the work and terrible for others. Each one is a trade-off.
We are greedy: we want more.
Pointers to articles and a vocabulary comparison of Julia and R. Recalling the recent complaint that a user might know the operation in R but not Julia. And my suggestion that a “lite” topic map application might be useful in that context.