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by hatmatrix 363 days ago
Lispers might not like that it's not a Lisp, but I remember Luke Tierney also making a statement to the effect that the statisticians have spoken and they don't prefer the Lisp syntax.

So Julia is a happy middle ground - MATLAB-like syntax with metaprogramming facilities (i.e., macros, access to ASTs). Its canonical implementation is JIT, but the community is working on allowing creation of medium-sized binaries (there has been much effort to reduce this footprint).

1 comments

Julia isn't a lisp, but I think it's the most lispy non-S-expression based language around these days. The language creators took the lessons from lisp very seriously, and it shares a lot of functionality and philosophy with lisps.
Well I think the original author was a fan of Lisp and implemented the first Julia parser in femtolisp, IIRC. (And femtolisp was a lightweight Lisp of his own.)
Julia is somewhat different:

1. readability with explicit broadcast operators

2. interoperability with other languages including R and Python

3. performance often exceeding numpy and C/C++ code

4. usability in numerous workflows:

https://www.queryverse.org/

The idea of using Lisp or Prolog in a production environment doesn't sound fun at all. Yet, they do make some types of problems easier to handle. =3