Open-Source

Broadcasting in Julia is a way of writing vectorised code (think Matlab) that is performant and explicit. The benefits of performant code are obvious (faster!) but explicit vectorisation is also a significant benefit. When I first saw Matlab and how you could call the sin with a vector input, I was (slightly) blown away by the usefulness of this. It didn’t take too long for me to realise the limitations though; vectorising a complicated function can require quite a bit of code gymnastics, which doesn’t usually help the readability, particularly for those students who are relatively new to programming. ...

Over the past couple of years or so I’ve been getting into the Julia programming language; it’s been great to watch the language mature over time. Many people proclaim the virtues of its speed (it’s very fast for a dynamic language) but really I like its elegance - it’s a very well designed language that makes full use of multiple dispatch. (Multiple dispatch is something that I doubt most coders know much about but once you are used to it, it’s indispensable!) ...