My Julia Journey — Part I
How I Started the Trek
What’s Julia?
For starters, Julia is not an actor or even a person. It’s a programming language and according to its creators, Julia fills a gap between easy prototyping and performance:
“The Julia programming language fills this role: it is a flexible dynamic language, appropriate for scientific and numerical computing, with performance comparable to traditional statically-typed languages.”
Hmmm. That’s interesting and while I have found many ways around Python’s performance (e.g., Azure), it’s exciting to think maybe I can train a model in less time on my workstation.
Why Am I Doing This?
I really love Python. It’s easy, there’s an amazing ecosystem (via PyPi), and I use it every day. So why in the world would I ever even think of stepping out with Julia?
I’m not. Neither Julia nor Python are people — they’re tools.
I like programming languages in general, having programmed in BASIC (on a TRS-80 — why yes, I am “old”), Pascal, Visual Basic, C, C++, Lotus Notes (is that really programming though?), Delphi (visual Pascal), PowerBuilder, XSL (I know it’s not a programming language but it’s pretty close), and Java. Each…
