Julia programming language

Introduction

Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments [1], [2]. Julia intends to combine the best from Matlab, R and Python into one language that is supposed to be consistent, well designed and most importantly fast [3].

Julia language

A nice review by Evan Miller: [4]. Another review by John White: [5]. A review with some code samples by Chris Wellons: [6].

Julia, Matlab, and C comparison and benchmark by Justin Domke [7].

Numeric matrix manipulation in MATLAB, Python NumPy, R, and Julia by Sebastian Raschka [8].

Searchable listing of all registered packages for the Julia programming language [9].

Tutorials

Aannotated tutorial links: Learning Julia [10].

Tutorials, overviews: Julia Documentation [2], A Beginner's Look at Julia [11], Learn Julia in Y Minutes [12], Programming in Julia [13].

Julia environment setup

Step-by-step setup, including Jupyter with IJulia [14]. This is from Part 1: Programming in Julia [13] of their course in Quantitative Economics [15], [16].

Summary

Install the current release from the download page [17].

After Julia installation, onpen Julia terminal and install the following useful packages:

  julia> Pkg.update()
  julia> Pkg.add("DataFrames")
  julia> Pkg.add("PyPlot")
  julia> Pkg.add("IJulia")
  julia> exit()

Jutyter notebook can be started by this command from a system terminal:

  $ ipython notebook --profile=julia
  

Alternatively it can be started in Julia [18]:

  julia> using IJulia
  julia> notebook()

References

1. julialang.org, Julia Language
2. julia.readthedocs.org, Julia Documentation
3. Sven Mesecke, Julia for Matlab users
4. Evan Miller, Why I'm Betting on Julia
5. John Myles White, Julia's Role in Data Science. Myths and Realities
6. Chris Wellons, The Julia Programming Language
7. Justin Domke, Julia, Matlab, and C
8. Sebastian Raschka, The cheat sheet for MATLAB, Python NumPy, R, and Julia
9. pkg.julialang.org, Packages for the Julia programming language
10. julialang.org, Learning Julia
11. Randy Zwitch, A Beginner's Look at Julia
12. Learn X in Y Minutes, Learn Julia in Y Minutes
13. Thomas J. Sargent, John Stachurski, Part 1: Programming in Julia
14. Thomas J. Sargent, John Stachurski, Setting up Your Julia Environment
15. Thomas J. Sargent, John Stachurski, The Julia side of quant-econ.net
16. Thomas J. Sargent, John Stachurski, Quantitative Economics
17. julialang.org, Download
18. Chris von Csefalvay, Learn Julia the Hard Way