The Julia programming language.

Ifihanagbara Olusheye — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 12:17:32 +0000

INTRODUCTION

As tech evolves, things get to be made better, faster, and more simplified. This goes for programming languages too. Languages have been modified to be better and this has led to the development of a number of relatively new programming languages one of which is Julia.

WHAT IS JULIA?

We want a language that’s open-source, with a liberal license. We want the speed of C with the dynamism of Ruby. We want a language that’s homoiconic, with true macros like Lisp, but with obvious, familiar mathematical notation like Matlab. We want something as usable for general programming as Python, as easy for statistics as R, as natural for string processing as Perl, as powerful for linear algebra as Matlab, as good at gluing programs together as the shell. Something that is dirt simple to learn yet keeps the most serious hackers happy. We want it interactive and we want it compiled. - Why We Created Julia

Julia is a high-level, dynamic programming language with high performance. It is a general-purpose application used to write any application. It was created by Jeff Bezanson, Alan Edelman, Stefan Karpinski, and Viral B. Shah in MIT, 2009. The first version was released in 2012.

Julia has been downloaded over 25 million times and the Julia community has registered over 5,000 Julia packages. It was influenced by a lot of languages like Python, C, MATLAB, R, Lisp, Perl, Ruby, and Lua. It is also integrated into several Integrated Development Editors (IDEs) and Code editors with the filename extension .jl.

Julia was designed to increase speed in parallel computing, carry out machine learning, scientific computing, data mining, and so on. Using the JIT (Just-in-time) compiler makes the language very fast. Julia is garbage-collected, uses eager evaluation, and provides robust libraries for floating-point estimation, linear algebra, random number generation, and regular expression matching.

It also comes with a full-featured interactive command-line REPL (read-eval-print loop) and has many features that can help you test snippets and debug your code.

FEATURES

Some of the features of Julia are:

It is Open Source on GitHub.
Combination of power, simplicity, and efficiency.
Has the speed of C.
Looks like Python.
Easy for statistics like R.
Interoperability: Capability of two different programming languages to natively interact as part of the same system.
Dynamic.
General optimally typed.
Support for Unicode, including but not limited to UTF-8.

The feature I love most is that it looks like Python. Coming from a Python background, it's quite easy to learn and understand the language within a few hours. Below is a countdown function written in Julia and Python.

# julia 
function countdown(n)
    if n ≤ 0
        println("Blastoff!!")
    else
        println(n, " ")
        countdown(n - 1)
    end
end
countdown(5)

# python 
def countdown(n):
    if n <= 0:
        print("Blastoff!!")
    else:
        print(n, " ")
        countdown(n - 1)

countdown(5)

USES

Julia is mainly used for Scientific computing. Some non-scientific computing uses are:

Backend Development.
Visualization.
Data Science.
Machine Learning.
Parallel Computing.

OPPORTUNITIES

There are several opportunities that come with the use of the Julia language. Each opportunity is connected to a use case of the language and some of these include:

Machine Learning Engineer.
MLOps Engineer.
Geospatial developer.
Researcher.

CONCLUSION/MY TAKE ON JULIA

The Julia ecosystem has experienced massive growth in recent times as more developers discover about the language and its utility. Getting started with Julia is easy and communities exist ready to offer assistance. Currently, the official communities are on Slack and Discourse.

I've only just begun to scratch the surface of the programming language but with only a little study and research, I've been able to gather knowledge on some excellent Julia features and opinions. It is a modern programming language that prioritizes efficiency and usability.

If you're looking to try out something new, Julia is definitely worth your time.

References:

Thank you!

How to be Successful with Remote Learning.

Ifihanagbara Olusheye — Tue, 20 Apr 2021 08:11:12 +0000

A Remote learning setting is any setting in which the student and the educator/instructor are not in the same room or environment as in the traditional classroom setting. Instead, information is relayed over a distance and to a possibly wider audience through various media such as websites, blogs, video conferencing and even through audio.

In recent times, due to the current pandemic ravaging the world, remote learning has never been more widely sought after. We have been forcefully confined to our homes without access to the traditional settings for learning, thus making remote learning the safest means by which learning can still take place without putting the lives of the students, teachers and general public at risk.

With that said, remote learning can often be daunting, and sometimes confusing; with so many possible fields and available learning platforms in contrast to the limited time, financial strength and focus available, a guide can sometimes be necessary.
Relating this to tech, there are a lot of things people would want to do and learn and have no clue on how to start most times.

I'll be sharing a few tips on how to effectively leverage on remote learning platforms, and achieve optimal results.

Pick an interest: This is a very important step. Deciding on what you would want to learn is essential to prevent wasting resources, wasting time and ending in frustration. So decide on what you would want to learn and also what you would want to achieve after learning it before committing to any course.
Set a realistic goal: Realistic goals are goals that are achievable after putting the resources, skills, and time available into consideration. Setting a realistic goal would help direct your focus and guide you in planning towards learning efficiently.
Planning and Scheduling: Pick a time range which you would dedicate to studying and create a schedule around it. Work diligently and passionately during these times and try to stick to your schedule as much as possible. Avoid procrastination, it steals time.
Work on projects: During and after your set goal, work on projects. This helps to track your progress and gives you something tangible to show for your efforts. Implement whatever you have learnt over time.

Productivity Tips

You can only be successful if you are productive during the time you’ve dedicated to studying. Here are some productivity tips you can follow:

Do not read close to your sleeping area.
To improve your productivity, create a schedule that suits both your project and your work style. Schedules help you stay organised.
Rest when you are fatigued. You will find you are more productive afterwards.
Eat when it is right, not when you feel like it.
Effective communication is important for the success of any group task. Use social platforms like Slack, Zoom, or WhatsApp to stay connected with your teammates.
Self-imposed deadlines help to curb procrastination.
The best way to focus is by avoiding distractions.

Resources for Remote Learning

There are various platforms for remote learning, some are free while others have to be paid for to have access to some content. Some of them include:

The Interledger Community 🌱: Ifihanagbara Olusheye