What makes Julia special?

I'll chime in first, a huge part of this (at least for me) is the community. Such an amazing group of people who are always willing to go out of their way to support other people learning the language and building cool things.

For me it is the spirit of the community, and a natural extension of this is the large choice of high quality packages such as

• LoopVectorization
• FFTW
• FastGaussQuadrature
• SciML/DifferentialEquations
• Plots
• Makie
• QuadGK
• FastTransforms
• Measurements

and many more. Surprising interoperability is a very cool side effect of julia too, such as getting errors on root finding or errorbars on plots when setting up a problem using Measurements. Then there is the #julialang twitter ...

The speed is amazing and huge plus. And the relative readability and features of the language are very impressive. It was obvious from version 1.0 that there was a huge amount of planning and cohesiveness built-in. And, of course, the REPL is icing on the cake.

For me it is

• The community. Always someone around who knows more about some niche and can help out.
• No classes (object-oriented programming).
• Platform independent package manager.
• Consistent core language.
• Most packages use automated testing (CI) and are open for PRs

I’ve not found a language that was as easy to get thoughts into code… once you understand the syntax, which doesn’t take that long.

Also: no make files, no header files, no proprietary license fee, and no space-based syntax.

There are other challenges to overcome for adoption into our enterprise workflow. But I’m amazed at the speed at which these issues are being addressed and eventually dispatched.

is this forem better than discourse?