[ulysses4ever]

You're quite right about the organic nature. The story of how we get together could be better told by our prof, Jan Vitek, I guess. But in a nutshell, one of his older students (Ben, also an author of the paper) was once on a plane with some other student, Jean, from MIT, where Julia was developed, and Ben got interested and told Jan… Then there were occasional meetings with Julia devs (Jeff Bezanson in particular) that turned out to be super nice and inviting people. I should add, we're all from Northeastern University in Boston, and that's close to MIT... All in all, we decided PL academia should learn about this "organic gem".