Introduction to programming in Julia

Julia is a scientific programming language that is free and open source - see https://julialang.org/ for downloads, documentation, learning resources etc. Bridging high-level interpreted and low-level compiled languages, it offers high performance (comparable to C and Fortran) without sacrificing simplicity and programming productivity (like in Python or R).

Julia has a rich ecosystem of libraries aimed towards scientific computing and a powerful in-built package manager to install and manage their dependencies. Julia is also gaining ground in both data science and high-performance computing (HPC), thanks to a rich package ecosystem around data analysis and visualisation, machine learning, deep learning, threading and distributed-memory parallelisation, as well as GPU computing.

This lesson covers the basics of Julia: its syntax, multiple-dispatch paradigm, package development and best practices. It spans the necessary foundational skills required to follow the two other ENCCS lessons on Julia:

• Julia for High Performance Scientific Computing

• Julia for High Performance Data Analysis

Prerequisites

• Experience in one or more programming languages.

• Basic familiarity with a command line (terminal) interface.

Reference

• Quick Reference
• Instructor’s guide

Who is the lesson for?

This lesson is appropriate for researchers, engineers and analysts from academia, industry or the public sector who want to adopt a new programming language into their repertoire. It also represents the prerequisite knowledge to follow other ENCCS lessons on Julia - Julia for High Performance Scientific Computing and Julia for High Performance Data Analysis.

About the lesson

This lesson is developed by ENCCS - the Swedish node of the EuroCC network. It is open source and can be reused and remixed in derivative work; see detailed license information below.

See also

Many excellent learning resources exist for the Julia language. For an overview, visit https://julialang.org/learning/.

Credits

The lesson file structure and browsing layout is inspired by and derived from work by CodeRefinery licensed under the MIT license. We have copied and adapted most of their license text.

Instructional Material

This instructional material is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY-4.0). The following is a human-readable summary of (and not a substitute for) the full legal text of the CC-BY-4.0 license. You are free to:

• share - copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format

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The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow these license terms:

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• No additional restrictions - You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

With the understanding that:

• You do not have to comply with the license for elements of the material in the public domain or where your use is permitted by an applicable exception or limitation.

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Software

Except where otherwise noted, the example programs and other software provided with this repository are made available under the OSI-approved MIT license.