In this chapter and the next, we will discuss the features that make Julia appealing to the data scientist and the scientific programmer.

Julia was conceived to meet the frustrations of the principal developers with the existing programming languages; it is well designed and beautifully written. Moreover, much of the code is written in Julia, so it is available for inspection and change. Although we do not advocate modifying much of the base code (also known as the standard library), it is there to look at and learn from.

Much of this book is aimed at the analyst, with some programming skills and the jobbing programmer, so we will postpone the guts of the Julia system until the last chapter when we consider package development and contributing to the Julia community.