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Stefan, do you mind telling me what your programming background is? What languages did you come from before working on Julia?

I'm going to look more into the documentation for it now.

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Not at all. I've done a lot of C, Matlab, Perl, Ruby and R, although I've also dabbled in Java, JavaScript, C++, Scala and Python. Definitely a polyglot of "pragmatic" languages. Julia was influenced most strongly by Lisp (Scheme in particular), Matlab, C, Python, Ruby and Perl. If you (or anyone else reading this) have questions looking through the manual, drop an email to the julia-users@googlegroups.com list, or me personally.

I have just started going through the docs a bit. I am interested in 2 things. One, programs that interface with other commands -- essentially rewriting large shell programs in a "better" language. I saw the section on "external commands" and that looks very promising. Are there any other links or sample programs I can check out. Would Julia be just as good as say Ruby in this respect ?

Is there a readline interface ?

Second, I haven't yet come across an ncurses interface yet.

Thanks.

edit: Just came across your article "Shelling out sucks". | In my followup post, I will describe how Julia makes constructing and executing pipelines of external commands as safe as Python’s subprocess and as convenient as shelling out. I could not find a link to the followup. Do you have something ?

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