Preface

Julia is a new programming language that was developed at MIT in the Applied Computing Group under the supervision of Prof. Alan Edelman. Its development started in 2009, and it was first presented publicly in February 2012. It is still a fairly young language when you look at the current Version number (0.3), but its foundation is stable; the core language has had no backwards incompatible changes since Version 0.1. It is based on clear and solid principles, and its popularity is steadily increasing in the technical, data scientist, and high-performance computing arenas. In the section The Rationale for Julia, we present an overview of the principles on which Julia is based and compare them to other languages.