Julia Programming Language: What you should know?

Years ago, when the C language first came into the market, it changed the whole world. There was no other language or source that could solve real life as efficiently as this language.

However, as time passed, people came to realize that they need a language that was more object-oriented than the C, and that’s what gave birth to C++. The new language was fine, but it was difficult, so they came up with a newer one, java.

After Java, the programmers understood that there was and never will be a perfect programming language. It was this understanding that later became the base of a highly advanced scientific programming language of all time, Julia.

This post will focus on this specific programming language. It will introduce you to Julia and answer common questions like, why Julia is so different why you should learn to use it and many others. So, keep reading:

What is Julia?

Julia is a high- level programming language which is exclusively designed for scientific and mathematical works. Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, Viral B. Shah, and Alan Edelman developed it in 2009 with the aim of creating a faster, reliable and free alternative for the languages like Python, Perl and more.

The language combines the qualities of Python, Ruby, Perl, R, and Matlab while overcoming all their weakness or flaws. The high-level users see it as the most successful language for complicated numerical analysis and computation.

The language supports syntaxes which are very close to the original mathematic formulas and includes the support for parallelism. You can even use it for cloud computing for big data projects.

Why Should You Learn Julia?

Julia made its first appearance in 2012 and became an instant hit. Today even the most elite companies or institutes like Google, NASA, Intel, and many others are already working with this language. Even companies like Netflix and RStudio are inclining towards Julia.

With such popularity and demand, it has become one of the most potent languages for programmers.

At a personal level, Julia is a progressive language with many features that simplifies coding works. The language package comes with all the essential libraries you need and offers a very decent speed. It can help you to solve even the most ill-defined and write your own numerical algorithm with ease.

Some other features that make Julia highly-recommended for you are:

Balances Both Dynamic And Static Features

Usually, there are two different types of programming languages, Static and Dynamic. The static languages need you to type the computable before executing the program while dynamic languages are unpredictable until the run time.

Julia is a dynamic program but with the advantages of static languages. This feature helps you to develop more efficient codes and also guides the method about the functional arguments which need deep integration with the language.

Solves the Two Language Issues

Most of the developers have to develop their programs by integrating multiple languages. Typically, they create their prototype program in a slow-dynamic language and then rewrite them in faster languages for production.

This conversion requirement makes the program inefficient and open to human errors. It increases the work effort of the developer, slow the working cycles, and allow the competitors to bypass your company.

Julia can help you to avoid this “two language problem” and prevent the losses. The language offers a balance of all programming languages like C, C++, R, Python, and more on a single platform. So, you can create the main program and the performance-critical parts at the same place

Wide Usability

Julia’s primary purpose was to solve deep arithmetic and logical program, but that doesn’t mean, you cannot use it for regular programming. Julia is efficient for writing programs and software of a wide variety.

The language also packs some advance Lisp-like macros and meta programming capabilities which comes in handy for managing shell processes. Its standard library also includes process control, logging, profiling, asynchronous, and more.

Julia Based Libraries

Often, the programs like Python will include C/C++ codes for enhancing speed and compilation of the program.

However, the same isn’t true for Julia. This language shares the speed of C/C++ and can single-handily manage every aspect of the program. Even the base code and library of this language are free of any other language. They all use Julia itself as the base language.

Excellent Call Support For Other Languages

Julia is pretty self-sufficient in its functionality, but if you ever need to import libraries, you can do that too. Julia’s developer designed it with a “no boilerplate” philosophy in mind. It allows you to call functions to a program without any code generation, compilation, “glue” code or interactive prompt. You can use Julia’s ccall syntax for this task.

Further, Julia also enables you to share data with other programming languages like Python, R, and more. You can also use the embedding API to embed Julia to other programs. You can call Julia in Python using PyJulia and in r using R’s JuliaCall.

Support Parallelism

Over the years, the data processing requirement of programs and softwares have increased. Processing such a massive amount of data on a single system is very difficult, and the developer has no option but to switch to multi-node processing.

However, most of the older languages like Python are not ready for it. These languages tend to stick with the old Global Interpreter lock, which allows only single line processing.

Julia, on the other hand, is entirely compatible with multiple computer processing. It supports parallelism at instructional, multi-threading, and even distributed computing levels.

Moreover, Julia can also compile native codes according to the hardware acceleration of the system.

The Final words

Julia is a very advanced, user-friendly, and easy to use open source language. It presents the goodness of all the highly-appreciated computer programming languages at a single spot and that too without any flaw.

The language has gained a lot of fame in the last seven years with a vast range of opportunities and facilities it provides to the developers. The demand for both the developer who can help this language and the developer who can write programs in Julia is pretty high.

Akran Artoul, CEO of SiteSonic, and his team believes that this language is the future of programming languages. The experts at SiteSonic are also trying to support the developers and helping them learn this programming language.

You can always turn towards them for resources and help regarding Julia programming.You can also visit SiteSonic for other website building tasks for mobile and development support.