Julia is a programming language used for scientific computation and mathematical programming. Julia is a combination of C and Python, which doesn’t mean that it literally copies any of the features from either of the languages. This combination holds the feature of high execution speed of C and flexible code writing of Python.
Julia was developed by a group of 4 people at MIT. It is a high level, dynamic and open-source programming language that is used for statistical computation and data analysis. Julia was built mainly because of its speed in programming, it has much faster execution as compared to Python and R. Julia provides support for big data analytics by performing complex tasks such as cloud computing and parallelism, which play a fundamental role in analyzing Big Data.
Python is a programming language that was introduced to provide ease to their programmers to express their concepts in fewer lines of code. It was created by Guido van Rossum in 1991 and further developed by the Python Software Foundation. Python is a programming language that lets you work quickly and integrate systems more efficiently.
Below are some major differences between Julia and Python:
| Feature | Julia | Python |
|---|
| Speed | Julia is much faster than Python as it has execution speed very close to that of C. | Python on the other hand is fast but is slower in comparison to C. |
| Community | Julia being a new language holds a community of very small size, hence resources for solving doubts and problems are not much. | Python has been around for ages, and it has a very large community of programmers. So, it becomes much easier to get your problems resolved online. |
| Code Conversion | Julia codes can easily be made by converting C or Python codes. | It is very difficult to make Python codes by converting C codes or the other way around. |
| Array Indexing | Julia arrays are 1-indexed, i.e. arrays start with 1-n not 0-n. It might cause a problem with programmers having habit of using other languages. | Python arrays are 0-indexed. Generally, every language has 0-indexing for arrays. |
| Libraries | Julia has limited libraries to work upon. However, it can interfere with libraries of C and Fortran to handle plots. | Python on the other hand has plenty of libraries, hence it becomes easier to perform multiple additional tasks. |
| Dynamically Typed | Julia is dynamically typed language, it helps developers to create variables without specifying their types. Julia also provides a benefit of Static typing. | Python is also dynamically typed and helps in creation of variables without type declaration. It is different from Julia just because it is not statically typed. |