For the past year, my friend, Ole Kröger, and I have been developing a native animation package in Julia called, Javis.jl. Through our development process, we have been able to build a nearly 70 person developer community, sponsor Google summer of code students, and help new Julia programmers create powerful visuals! We recently presented the tool at JuliaCon, and were able to show its use for educational outreach and beyond.

Our hope is that this open source tool can be used by programmers, educators, professionals and researchers from across the globe to convey their ideas in winsome and understandable ways!

People (mostly Scientists, but not only) are excited about Julia. Like, really excited. Why? A few reasons that might not be obvious to run of the mill software developers.

The Julia community is unified by something else, as well: a shared delight in the magical (this word cropped up more than once) power of Julia to facilitate collaboration and code reuse.

This Ars piece is a great read if you’re curious about Julia or if you simply dig programming languages and learning about new/interesting ones.

Sergio De Simone, reporting for InfoQ:

In a recent paper, MIT researchers introduced Gen, a general-purpose probabilistic language based on Julia that aims to allow users to express models and create inference algorithms using high-level programming constructs.