Julia joins the PetaFlop club – 650,000 cores, 1.3M threads, 56 TB of data

I'm ready for the new wave of interest in Julia as the language gets close to a stable 1.0 release. I jumped into Julia a few years ago just to test the waters and found it at least as pleasant as R or Python for basic and not-so-basic data tasks.

If I could wave a wand and choose what language I write day-to-day I would still rather have a full S-expression lisp like Racket, but a Dylan-like language with good performance and well-considered libraries is a solid consolation prize.

If Julia can get RStudio to extend tooling support to Julia (unlikely, because if this were easy, they'd have done so for Python already), or if someone like Julia Computing can replicate the RStudio experience, the future for Julia will be interesting.

If anyone out there uses R with Emacs Speaks Statistics, and wants a pleasant surprise, give Julia a shot and see that ESS supports Julia out of the box.

The growth of Julia seems a bit overstated. If I look at Google trends it's more on a plateaued even slightly downward trajectory.