Why Julia is the programming language defined to dominate our future
Recently, we published a list of the top five programming languages for developers.
Of course, Python made this list because of its ease of use and popularity. But another language may soon overtake Python in popularity – Julia.
What is this new MITlanguage created and what can it do?
Origins of free and open source language
You’ll have to forgive the reference, but I couldn’t resist.
Julia programming language shares little with crying Drew barrymore from the movie The wedding singer. After all, it’s a programming language and not a woman in love about to have a name that rhymes.
Julia 1.0’s breakthrough is the result of a multi-year project on behalf of an MIT group.
Originally released in 2012, Alain edelman, Stefan Karpinski, Jeff Bezanson, and Viral shah continued to work on the language. It is a free and open source language with around 700 active contributors.
It has 1,900 registered packages, 2 million downloads, 41,000 GitHub stars and an annual download growth rate of 101%. More than 700 research institutes and universities also use it, as well as companies like Netflix and A capital letter.
Other developers have also worked on it, according to a MIT News article.
Julia is distinguished by her membership in the “petaflop club”. This means that it uses 1.0 million threads, 9,300 Knights Landing nodes (KNLs) and 650,000 cores to achieve 1.5 petaflops per second as it lists 188 million astronomical objects like stars.
By the way: on the world’s fastest supercomputer, it did it in just 14.6 minutes.
This can be the equal Node.js for technical computing
Node.js facilitates real-time web application functions using push technology. The server and the client can start to communicate, thus freely exchanging data.
In the same way that Node.js has increased web development, Julia is ready to do the same for technical computing. As the Youtube tutorial above says, Julia helps unite two disparate groups: “the experts in the field and the speed freaks.”
Others say it’s more of a niche language designed for numerical and scientific computing.
However, data scientists also find it very useful. In reality, IntelLabs has released a processing engine that uses Julia known as HPAT.jl. Built in the Julia framework, it functions as a high performance analysis (HPAT) toolkit for big data analysis on clusters.
It’s meant to be a combination of the usability of Python and VS speed. It also has the dynamic elements of Ruby, the statistical capacities of R, and the mathematical specialties of MatLab. But is this unicorn really effective?
He went from 50th to 39th in just one month in TIOBE choice of “interesting movements”. The developer analyst firm Redmonk also gave her some love.
The use of Julia by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) also gives credibility to its status as a unicorn programming language.
Big plans for Julia’s future applications
Although data scientists and mathematicians favor language, it has other applications in many industries, including:
- 3d printing
- Augmented reality
- Autonomous cars
- Genomics
- Risk management
- Precision medicine
- Machine learning
The language has a chameleon quality that allows coders to shape it according to their needs.
TechRepublic said he “looks like a scripting language “, but you can compile “efficient native code”For many platforms using a low-level virtual machine (LLVM).
One of the MIT researchers on the project, Viral shah, said the central inspiration for Julia’s development revolved around how people often had to write the same program multiple times.
“If you are a mathematician, scientist or engineer, you have historically had the choice of choosing a fast language, like C ++ or Java, or an easy-to-learn language, like Matlab, R or Python. “
Julia eliminates the need for this binary, which may explain its rapid rise in popularity.
But if you don’t care about processing speed, you might be better off with whatever language you’re currently using. Julia also lags behind in tools for identifying bugs and performance issues. But Shah says the community will likely continue to grow.
You can download Julia for free here and DIY her however you want.