The Julia Programming Language

Published on 11 April 2018 (Updated: 09 November 2024)
The Julia Programming Language

Welcome to the Julia page! Here, you'll find a description of the language as well as a list of sample programs in that language.

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Description

Despite being a relatively new language, Julia has a [Wikipedia1 page. As a result, I won't have to dig too much to learn about the language.

At any rate, Julia is a computational science language which fills a niche similar to Python and R. In fact, like Python, Julia can be used for general-purpose programming.

One of Julia's interesting features is multiple dispatch, something that is lacking in Python. Roughly speaking, multiple dispatch allows a user to define multiple functions with the same name but different combinations of arguments.

In addition, Julia is capable of calling C and Python functions directly. Personally, I think that's a fun little feature considering Julia is compiled at runtime. So, it gets C-like performance as well, perfect for numerical analysis.

Finally, Julia has metaprogramming features, so the language can be modified as needed by the user. If Julia ever takes off, we can probably expect several different dialects of it to emerge.

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