Julia: a programming language for scientific computing

Abstract: 

The Julia programming lanuage was recently created by a group at MIT under Alan Edelman.  It aims to combine the advantages of dynamically typed scripting languages such as Python with performance that is almost as good as statically typed languages such as Fortran or C.  Julia is targeted at scientific and other technical applications.  In the first part of the talk, I present some simple code examples that give the general flavour of the language.  I will then discuss some more technical features, and conclude with a few thoughts about scientific computing.