What is the Julia language? A fresh approach to numerical computing

Julia is a free open source, high-level, high-performance, dynamic programming language for numerical computing. It has the development convenience of a dynamic language with the performance of a compiled statically typed language, thanks in part to a JIT-compiler based on LLVM that generates native machine code, and in part to a design that implements type stability through specialization via multiple dispatch, which makes it easy to compile to efficient code. In the blog post announcing the initial release of Julia in 2012, the authors of the language--Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, Viral Shah, and Alan Edelman--stated that they spent three years creating Julia because they were greedy. They were tired of the trade-offs among Matlab, Lisp, Python, Ruby, Perl, Mathematica, R, and C, and wanted a single language that would be good for scientific computing, machine learning, data mining, large-scale linear algebra, parallel computing, and distributed computing. In addition to being attractive to research scientists and engineers, Julia is also attractive to data scientists and to financial analysts and quants.