A programming language to heal the planet together: Julia | Alan Edelman | TEDxMIT

Even as the climate is warming, there is so little we know about it today. Computational modeling is how climate scientists reconcile our understanding of climate with what we observe. Traditionally, these models would have been written in Fortran, but today’s climate emergency needs tools that are significantly easier to work with. Julia was built for this purpose and makes it easy for everybody focused on solving the problem to work together effectively. No more silos; we must now be part of an interconnected world.

[dakota]

Julia: clean like python, fast like C. Not for use in software dev, but rather for use in science, data, and math.

[startlingbird]

OMG, I went to HS with the inventor of Julia, we were on the same math team and calculus class. I graduated a year ahead of him. We are the same age but I skipped a grade. Even though I was really good a math, I hated graphs. He on the other hand drew graphs all day long. He was always doing something with mass points and/or complex numbers.

[Arjun-vydx]

Fast, efficient, simple & easy are the core elements that always win. Julia, having all these, will gain the top position among most popular languages very soon.

[reksmeyok]

Julia is not just the programming language for math, it is the math.

[tangoolo]

Ease, Speed.. and there is a third factor as well, i.e. Size. Julia has scope of improvement in generating a smaller size of programs.

[ron]

This is a very important TEDx Talk. Why so few in the audience?

[MrJayakumar]

Julia programming language looks easy like python and its faster like c programming .. i am very much interested to learn

[johndoe-gf]

Julia is an epitome of human ingenuity. we humans always seeks for perfections and this is the result of it.

[aek]

The cool thing is his first program was Hello world.

[ArgumentumAdHominem]

From this presentation julia sounds like unicorn dreamland. Computational modeling is inherently hard. Having worked extensively on different versions of finite element methods I am extremely skeptical on whether the math can simply be separated from the implementation as shown on the slides. In the performance world each problem has its own optimal algorithm, and it is exactly the very non-trivial machine-level tweaks like manual hash management, fine-tuning of relaxation paramteters, choosing the forwards integration scheme, etc ... that make the task hard. It is of course cute to be able to write equations as equations in the code, but that has never really been a problem. One simply writes the equations in some function, extensively tests that function, and never looks at its contents again.

[hmdz]

Correct me if I am wrong; Julia is NOT fast on the first run. It becomes fast on the second run. And that is the big deal. It means any changes to Julia code has to be JITted first, the loops unrolled and the results cashed. It is like the Julia JIT compiler calculates the results of loops and arithmetics in the first run (slow) and in the second run, it outputs the cashed results.

[anonymouslegion]

can it be used for red team tool development?

[haoli]

Writing code with JuliaLang is easy. Optimization and morphism design is hard.

[Elite]

Unfortunately he told us nothing at all about Julia. Why should I use it? What makes it different from Go or Rust or Java? Is it general purpose or domain specific like R or MatLab?

[okdoomer]

Isn't "codes" something different? Since when is it used as plural for code?

[elye]

I dunno. This simple bit seems arcanish to me.

s1 = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog α, β, γ"
# again with a regular expression
r = replace(s1, r"b[\w]*n" => "red")
show(r); println()
#> "The quick red fox jumps over the lazy dog α, β, γ"

[justinzhang]

It sounds like a declaration of independence or something like that.

[budiardjo]

the source code julia is really nice to read.

[srinivasanrajagopal]

Wow, what a setting to host a Ted talk!!

[nicholaslee]

How come this man shows messy code and says "oh look how messy this is" but the code is also written in julia?