Julia Enters Top 50 Programming Languages

Julia has taken its place among the top 50 computer programming languages, according to the TIOBE Programming Community Index, an index of the world’s most popular programming languages:

Julia Enters Top 50 for the First Time

It was a matter of time until Julia would hit the top 50. This month it did so. The Julia programming language is meant for numerical computing. It combines functional programming paradigms with high speed. In other words, readable and stable code that performs. Chances are high that Julia will gain even more popularity [during] the next few months.

TIOBE Index for September 2016

About Julia

Julia is the simplest, fastest and most powerful numerical computing language available today. Julia combines the functionality of quantitative environments such as Python, R, MATLAB, SAS, SPSS and Stata, with the speed of production programming languages like Java and C++ to solve big data and analytics problems. Julia delivers dramatic improvements in simplicity, speed, capacity, and productivity for data scientists, algorithmic traders, quants, scientists, and engineers who need to solve massive computational problems quickly and accurately.

Julia offers an unbeatable combination of simplicity and productivity with speed that is thousands of times faster than other mathematical, scientific and statistical computing languages.

Partners and users include: Intel, The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Lincoln Laboratory (MIT), The Moore Foundation and a number of private sector finance and industry leaders, including several of the world’s leading hedge funds, investment banks, asset managers and insurers.

About the TIOBE Programming Community Index

The TIOBE Programming Community Index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. For more information, please visit www.tiobe.com.

Should I Learn Julia?

Why Julia, Why Now?

Programming is a diverse field! You have people from all around the world, tackling every sort of problem imaginable with their computers. From web-developers, to mobile app creators, from legacy code maintainers, to scientific computing mathematicians, many people need different features and different languages.

Julia is a relatively young language, released in 2012, and was designed to meet the high-performance needs of numerical and scientific programming; while being a general-purpose programming language. Depending on what you are looking to build now or in the future Julia may just be the language for you!

Nassim Taleb and Julia

For those of you who don’t know who Nassim Taleb is just bear with me for a minute on this tangent.

But really if you haven’t heard of him you should check out some of his work Wikipedia – Nassim Taleb.

One of Nassim Taleb’s areas of expertise is in the field of risk management, and if you are going to undertake the commitment of learning a new programming language you should think a little bit about risk. While I do believe that you can’t really choose a wrong programming language, depending on what you are trying to get your computer to do, some languages will make this task easier or at least more intuitive. Nassim Taleb often discusses a risk management technique he calls “the barbell strategy”. The barbell strategy was initially applied to investments. Many of you are probably familiar with a graph that looks like the following:

Many investors in search of a higher return, choose to be somewhere in the middle. They underestimate their risk exposure and end up going bust!

The barbell strategy suggests, putting what you need at the left side of the chart, where you get a small and safe return. Then to increase your risk exposure, put some assets to the far right, where they may get a large return, but if you lose them you will not be broke. You get the potential for some large returns on a portion of your assets, while you keep the assets you need safe.

Umm… I Thought We Were Talking About Julia?

Yes! So my main programming language is C#. I consider C# to be a safe language with plenty of demand and a solid future (JavaScript would be another great example). With this in mind, I can invest time into learning Julia, with the goal of expanding my data science and numerical programming abilities. Sure there is R, or Python, or Scala, or some others, but I have decided that Julia offers a great potential (return) and that now is a great time to start learning it. As Julia continues to grow and if it does become the language for specific applications, I will have years of experience at that time.

If you want to become a software developer today, should Julia be your first language? It is fairly safe to say no. BUT on the condition that you can handle most the programming challenges in your field already with a language that lets you share and work on code with others, then Julia would be a great skill to add to your toolkit!

Stay tuned for more about getting started with Julia and my experience so far.

Thanks for reading,

Thomas