factoids

• Professional string mangler (specialize in conversion of human writing systems)
• works mostly in Python
• still learning Julia
• employed at the Goethe Univeristy Library, Frankfurt am Main
• MA in Hebrew Bible
• Very ignorant of mathematics, unlike most Julians
• From Wisconsin, living in Germany

reasons I like Julia

• I like Perl and BASH because it’s so easy to throw together a quick automation script. Julia does it better.
• I like Python and Ruby because they have simple but expressive syntax. Julia does it better.
• I like Lisp because of the awesome code-as-data macros. Julia’s got that.
• I like Haskell because of the type system, the emphasis short functions, pattern matching, type inference, TCO and lazy evaluation. Julia… Well, it’s got some of that.
• I like C because it’s crazy fast and it’s easy to see what’s going on with memory. Julia… has some of that; a lot more than other interpreted languages, at least.
• I like Go for the goroutines and channels. Julia’s green threads aren’t quite as awesome, but they do give you the same programming model, if not true parallel execution.