Philosophy

Julia was designed with scientific computing in mind. The developers tell us that they came with a wide array of programming skills – Lisp, Python, Ruby, R, and MATLAB.

All needed a “fast” compiled language in the armory such, as C or Fortran as the current languages listed previously are pitifully slow. Here is a quote from the development team:

We want a language that’s open source, with a liberal license. We want the speed of C with the dynamism of Ruby. We want a language that’s homoiconic, with true macros like Lisp, but with obvious, familiar mathematical notation like MATLAB. We want something as usable for general programming as Python, as easy for statistics as R, as natural for string processing as Perl, as powerful for linear algebra as MATLAB, as good at gluing programs together as the shell. Something that is dirt simple to learn yet keeps the most serious hackers happy. We want it to be interactive and we want it compiled...