Julia is a free and open-source general purpose programming language made specifically for scientific computing. It combines the ease of writing in high-level languages like Python and Ruby with the technical power of MATLAB and Mathematica and the speed of C. Julia is ideal for university-level scientific programming and it’s used in research.
Some time ago Viral Shah, one of the language’s co-creators, got in touch with us at the Raspberry Pi Foundation to say his team was working on a port of Julia to the ARM platform, specifically for the Raspberry Pi. Since then, they’ve done sterling work to add support for ARM. We’re happy to announce that we’ve now added Julia to the Raspbian repository, and that all Raspberry Pi models are supported!
Not only did the Julia team port the language itself to the Pi, but they also added support for GPIO, the Sense HAT and Minecraft. What I find really interesting is that when they came to visit and show us a demo, they took a completely different approach to the Sense HAT than I’d seen before: Simon, one of the Julia developers, started by loading the Julia logo into a matrix within the Jupyter notebook and then displayed it on the Sense HAT LED matrix. He then did some matrix transformations and the Sense HAT showed the effect of these manipulations.
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!
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Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!