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====== Why Julia? ====== Julia is a new scientific programming language, developed over the last four years largely at MIT. Hundreds of programming languages have been invented over the years, but only a handful have made it big. So why should we care about Julia? In a nutshell, Julia is the first modern, high-level, dynamic programming language that is both aimed squarely at science and effective for general-purpose computing. In terms of other languages, Julia has the high-level, dynamic, and general-purpose feel of Python, the powerful numerical syntax and libraries of Matlab, the execution speed of C, and the metaprogramming sophistication of Lisp. In bullet points, * Julia is dynamic: new objects, types, and functions can be created and modified on-the-fly. * Julia is high-level and general-purpose: it has built-in types for Lists, Tuples, Dicts, Arrays, Vectors, Matrices, Strings, etc. * Julia is aimed squarely at science: it designed to execute numeric code efficiently, and it has standard types and libraries for linear algebra, numerical integration, nonlinear equation solving, etc. *
