Why is the name of the language "Julia"?

[nilshg]

Now that this old thread has been resurrected, I feel I also have to leave here my (admittedly retconned) favourite semi-official explanation:

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…

(As the preview cuts out the punchline, it is: "Jeff’s uncommon lisp is automated)