[mrcactu5]

I have installed iJulia -- which involved compiling Julia from source.

What little bit I've tried with Julia so far is impressive.

What is the story anyway? Did a bunch of MIT people decide they needed something faster than R & numpy ?

Julia inventor Alan Edelman is an fellow alumnus of Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics (HCSSiM). Scores points in my book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Edelman

He wrote a terrific paper back in '95 http://arxiv.org/abs/math/9501224 "How many zeros of a random polynomial are real?"

[StefanKarpinski]

Alan is a rare and brilliant fellow. Just to clarify, he has been Julia's patron from the very early days, but the actual design and development of the language was done by Jeff Bezanson, Viral B. Shah, and myself. These days it's a collaborative community effort.