What is Julia named after?

[nilshg]

CAS benchmarks (Symbolics.jl and Maxima)

This is cool to see because it reminds me of a moment that was probably a key influence on julia. I learned the lisp lore that you could, say, write a macro to add type declarations to every subexpression, and then a good lisp implementation would generate fast code. I immediately thought two things: Why not just declare the types of variables? You can, but common lisp is generally too “type-unstable” (as we would call it) to be sure you’ll get the intended code. (May not be true for floats b…