Summary
An introduction to the new Julia language from scratch, emphasising similarities and differences with scientific Python.
Description
Julia is a new, up-and-coming language that has many similarities to Python, but some differences. One of its main advantages is the speed gain obtained by automatically compiling all code (in a somewhat similar way to PyPy, Cython, numba, etc.), despite having an interactive interface very similar to that of Python.
This will be a tutorial on the basic features of Julia from scratch, given by a user (rather than a developer) of the language, emphasising those features which are similar to Python (and hence do not require much explanation) and those features which are rather different.
The idea of the tutorial is to give an idea of why there is suddenly such a buzz around Julia and why it can be useful for certain projects.
This tutorial is aimed at people who are already familiar with the basic scientific Python packages; it is not aimed at beginners in scientific programming.