From the course: Learning Julia

Introduction to Julia - Julia Tutorial

From the course: Learning Julia

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Introduction to Julia

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- [Instructor] So what is the Julia language and what is there to be so excited about? Julia is a high-level dynamic programming language, similar to languages like Python or JavaScript. It is focused on high performance computing scenarios such as data science and other numerically focused computing problems. In many cases, Julia approaches the performance of statically typed C code. It can also be used on the client or the server and has a wide range of general purposes such as prototyping. It was started as a project in 2009 at MIT, and was introduced to the public and open-sourced in 2012. Over the past few years, Julia has gained acceptance with several notable users such as BlackRock, a major investment company in the US which employed Julia to perform time series analytic calculations. The British insurance company, Aviva, which used Julia to perform risk analysis and even the US Federal Reserve Bank of New York has used Julia to perform economic modeling saying that Julia gave them 10 times improvement over their previous MATLAB solution. For such a relatively young language, Julia has a rich ecosystem of packages available and is highly extensible making it really easy to create new packages and data types. But perhaps best of all, you don't need to give up your existing investments in other languages. Julia can interoperate with code in languages like Python, C, R, and even MATLAB. So you can continue to leverage the code that you've already written. In this course, we will take a high level overview of the Julia language, introduce its syntax, and learn about some of the key features that set it apart from other languages.

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