Is Julia the next big programming language? MIT thinks so, as version 1.0 lands (opens in new tab)

Also, anyone planning on writing a pl/Julia for Postgres? Please do ...

The beauty of Julia is that it started as a number-crunching PL with a focus on having enough flexibility to deal with any sort of number crunching you might want to do. Ie. The language is built to support complex numbers, quaternions, national numbers, dual-numbers, etc. just as well as it supports good ol' `Float64`s.

It turns out that making a language that did this satisfactorily requires that you build a language that supports amazing flexibility and expressiveness everywhere in the language which ended up making it a fantastic general purpose programming language.

The beauty is that Julia's AST is a language object that you can manipulate at runtime or compile time and make whatever modifications you like. This makes Julia code itself a wonderful intermediate representation for whatever domain specific language you'd care to build and the domain of that language need not be numeric.

> The use case for Julia (scripting language for number crunchers) is a tiny fraction of what PLs are used for.

Julia is a pretty awesome general purpose PL; it's motivating use may have been for number crunchers, but the result is strength in a number of areas of much broader application.

Julia is advertised as general purpose. I can imagine it eventually obtaining a presence in web development.