How an MIT research project became a global programming language

It all started with some exasperated emails. Back in 2009, a group of researchers began venting their frustration with the programming languages designed to help scientists and other researchers perform complex mathematical operations and statistical simulations without learning how to code. These programming languages were rigid and slow. If scientists built something that really worked, they’d need to rewrite the entire program in another language just to run it more quickly.

The emails turned into a research project at MIT with the mission of building an easy-to-use, high-performance programming language called Julia, which is designed for scientific research, data analysis, and modeling complex systems such as jet engines, drugs, financial markets, and robots, to name a few examples.

That research project turned into a lab at MIT, and the lab turned into the company JuliaHub. Along the way, Julia gained a loyal following among scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and others. Today, the free and open-source language counts more than 1 million users, including people working in thousands of companies and universities around the world.

It is only a slight exaggeration to say Julia has been used to model everything under the sun, from the behavior of tiny atoms to semiconductors, neural networks, race cars, and airplanes. It has also been used to study much beyond the sun, with astronomers using Julia for imaging black holes.

Julia’s secret sauce is in the way it compiles code depending on the type of data being used. Such “just-in-time compilation” makes Julia faster and more flexible than other numerical programming languages.