phdthesis

I do not think Julia ever intended to be a Python clone. Julia was created in 2009 when Python was not as popular as today. I think the statement is a strange one to make about a language that emerged from a PhD thesis. While one could say the objectives of Julia's design were academic (e.g. multiple dispatch) and more attention could have been paid to the practical application of the approach (e.g. where and how do we cache all this machine code we are generating), I find it incredulous to say a six year long PhD dissertation process was not a design phase. The thesis in question can be found here: https://github.com/JeffBezanson/phdthesis/blob/master/main.p...

In answer to the post's lament that popular & well-regarded languages seem not to emerge from academic work, I'd like to point out that the Julia programming language (released in only 2012, around the time of this post) whose core design formed Jeff Bezanson's PhD thesis [1]. Getting the dissertation done was also considered a high-priority issue [2] for the language development project :-) [1]: https://github.com/JeffBezanson/phdthesis/blob/master/main.p... [2]: https://github.com/julialang/julia/issues/8839

Can be downloaded here (PDF): https://github.com/JeffBezanson/phdthesis/raw/master/main.pd... For a shorter read with many of the same highlights, this is a paper about the design and implementation of Julia (PDF): https://julialang.org/publications/julia-fresh-approach-BEKS...

The generic function is the basic unit of abstraction in Julia. And this is exactly what makes Julia a very powerful language. If anyone is interested in reading more about Julia's design, I recommend Jeff Bezanson's thesis https://github.com/JeffBezanson/phdthesis/raw/master/main.pd...

Direct link to the PhD thesis: https://github.com/JeffBezanson/phdthesis/blob/master/main.p... Context: Jeff Bezanson is one of the designers of Julia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_(programming_language))

Against all odds, the PhD thesis itself is both approachable and extremely interesting to read, even for someone who has never written in Julia (and in all likelihood never will): https://github.com/JeffBezanson/phdthesis/blob/master/main.p...

Here is some stuff written on Julia: https://github.com/JeffBezanson/phdthesis/commit/9832392cce6...