Summary

In this introduction, we gave an overview of Julia's characteristics and compared them to the existing languages in its field. Julia's main advantage is its ability to generate specialized code for different input types. When coupled with the compiler's ability to infer these types, this makes it possible to write the Julia code at an abstract level while achieving the efficiency associated with the low-level code. Julia is already quite stable and production ready. The learning curve for Julia is very gentle; the idea being that people who don't care about fancy language features should be able to use it productively too and learn about new features only when they become useful or needed.