Julia <i>is</i> really impressive.  So, I uh, was working on a julia implementation of unums till I stopped being funded for it...<p>I&#x27;m currently writing unit and continuous tests for a computer chip that is being simulated - basically julia does the computation in x86, which suggests what the IEEE result <i>should</i> be, and then generates the assembler and passes it on to the assembler.<p>It probably could have been easily written in something like python, ruby, or perl, but the modularness of Julia, functional programming, and (optional) explicit typing result in easy-to-read code and a sense of security that there are no shenanigans going on under the hood with the type system.<p>Another cool thing is for more complicated code (working on a demonstration fast fourier transform) is that I can write the core FFT algorithm as a function with macros, and by swapping a different include that defines the macros differently, it can either run it as a virtual processor using internal Julia arrays that represent the memory and register files, <i>or</i> build up a file that contains the assembler code.  Again, this is obviously possible in other languages [0], but Julia makes it look nice and easy to comprehend.<p>[0] I&#x27;m thinking that ruby (especially with it&#x27;s DSL-eyness) would be really good for this, but I abandoned ruby when it became too difficult (I&#x27;m lazy and dense) to install the correct version on my own computer much less figure out how to install it on a server for other people to use.