# What is Julia named after?

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/what-is-julia-named-after/67720>\
**Category:** Offtopic\
**Created:** [September 5, 2021, 4:28pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/what-is-julia-named-after/67720 "2021-09-05T16:28:38Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
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**Author:** ![nilshg](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/nilshg/32/2283_2.png) [@nilshg](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/nilshg)\
**Post date:** [September 5, 2021, 4:38pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/what-is-julia-named-after/67720/4 "2021-09-05T16:38:36Z")

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> [@CAS benchmarks (Symbolics.jl and Maxima)](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/cas-benchmarks-symbolics-jl-and-maxima/58359/17):
>
> 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…

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