Julia: Empowering Next-Generation Research and Development

#Julia #IEEE #Computer #Software

There is a long-held belief that programming languages have some unavoidable trade-offs. For instance, they can be either easy to use or highly performant, but not both. Therefore, programmers often prototype in an easy-to-use language, like Python, and then convert their code's critical parts into a high-performance language, like C/C++ or Fortran. Such common practice has become known as the two-language problem. Julia is a relatively new programming language designed from the ground up to solve the two-language problem. Julia is both easy to use and highly performant at the same time, thus challenging the long-held stated belief. Moreover, Julia is a general-purpose programming language with unique features to empower next-generation research and application development, especially in the scientific computing and machine learning field.

This talk will highlight and demonstrate Julia's unique features, how well it solves the two-language problem, and what differentiates it from some popular programming languages. The talk will also present Julia's ecosystem, from IDEs to essential packages. Further, some issues and questions facing newcomers will be addressed. Lastly, learning resources will be provided to help leverage Julia's strengths in your next project.