Waiting For Darkness | Julia Programming Language

Julia command line

The nights will soon be growing longer as the dog days of summer draw to a close and we slowly ease closer to Fall. Cooler nights, rain, and wind will become the norm. We retreat to the inner sanctum with the radio (podcasts) playing in the background. A hot cup of coffee, dim light on above the workbench, trusty low powered laptops displaying simple terminals which facilitate exploring the possibilities of learning some new tips and tricks. No GUIs to distract into a mindless point and click wandering.

Cold dark dreary weather is perfect for perusing through some deep technical papers, thick computer books (yes, actual books made of paper and ink), or “help” files often neglected but often associated with our favorite coding language, IDE, or debugging programs. Like Alchemists searching for the great enlightenment where all pseudo-code and real code become one……

Great conclusions to be sought from toiling away the hours exploring the possibilities of perfection from the command line cursor…..

The new Julia release

A perfect setting for exploring the new 1.0 release of Julia. You can go back to the announcement “Why We Created Julia” on the julialang.org website and read a quick explanation of why the language was created. I hadn’t considered this language until I read the 1.0 release announcement posted on August 8, 2018. It wasn’t the possibility of the “speed of C” or the “Matlab like notation wandering. it was the possibility of using Julia as a “general programming language”. Sure we’ve got Python for that, but this is new to me, so it’s kind of cool (IMHO) to try something that is newer, yet somewhat familiar to learn about.

I won’t try to do a full description or review of the Julia programming language, because I haven’t used it enough yet. You can find a lot of useful info on their website, and download a version for your OS and start trying it out yourself. The bottom line is that you can use these dark dreary days and nights to enhance your old skills or learn some new ones. If reading boring technical manuals is your thing, then you’ll probably feel right at home reading every bit of documentation you can for whatever programming language you wish. You can view the videos from “juliacon” on YouTube, there are some interesting ones from 2017 and 2018. There’s a large community, and a few “Julia Bloggers”, along with some very wandering. and specific tutorials, all available via https://julialang.org

So pour yourself a hot cup of coffee, get out of the sun, and enjoy the distant sound of thunder as the rain begins to fall.

..and the wind begins to howl……

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