Julia
After 14 years of developing software primarily in Common Lisp, Michael Fiano gave Julia a try.
Eventually, he switched to using Julia as his main programming language [1].
From 2008 to 2022, I was writing my code exclusively in Common Lisp, every day. I was able to get my ideas into working code quickly and effectively.
– Michael Fiano [1:1]
Julia is gaining active users in the community of Physics researchers, and:
Julia has the potential to become the major programming language in numerical physics.
– Carsten Bauer [2]
[Julia] looks like Python, feels like Lisp, and runs like C++ or Fortran.
– Jane Herriman [3]
Installing Julia
Try brew install julia (MacOS). Alternatively, go to https://julialang.org/downloads/.
Run the REPL: julia.
To be able to run this book as notebooks, install Jupyter: pip3 install --user jupyter.
Calling Python functions
Say you have an existing codebase written in Python. How to call a function from a .py file?
As wrapping a Python library using PyCall is very easy, the most important Python libraries have been already wrapped in Julia, like Pandas in Pandas.jl, Scikit-learn in ScikitLearn.jl, etc.
– Antonello Lobianco [4]
An example, citing [4:1], would be:
using PyCall
py"""
def sumMyArgs (i, j):
return i+j
def getNElement (n):
a = [0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
return a[n]
"""
a = py"sumMyArgs"(3,4) # 7
b = py"sumMyArgs"([3,4],[5,6]) # [8,10]
typeof(b) # Array{Int64,1}
c = py"sumMyArgs"([3,4],5) # [8,9]
d = py"getNElement"(1) # 1
Further reading
- Discussion of [1:2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32745318