JuliaCon 2018 Summary Report

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Written by John Hearns

Published: 15 August 2018

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[Editors Note: Thanks to John for reporting in from JuliaCon 2018.]

Julia Con 2018 took place at London University College and the Microsoft Reactor space in Hoxton last week. The conference saw the release of the 1.0 version of the language.

My main impression is that Julia is being used in production for a wide range of uses. What follows is a small selection of keynotes and talks which impressed me. All of the conference talks are available in this YouTube playlist .

No Excuse: Quickly Learn Hadoop, Spark, and Other Analytics Tools

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Written by Douglas Eadline

Published: 09 August 2018

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From the "How to be a Hadoop/Spark smarty pants" department

Say it with me, "Apache Hadoop® is platform for data lake computing." There is a lot to unpack in that sentence. Specifically, Hadoop used to be a monolithic MapReduce engine. Now it is starting point for many other types of data analytics projects. Spark is a very popular and powerful language (written in Scala) that has an API for Python, R, and Java. Data lakes are large repositories of raw data that live in the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). Then there is a resource manager called YARN (Yet Another Resource Negotiator) that supports dynamic run-time resource usage and data locality (among other things). Where to begin?

Happy Birthday Julia

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Written by John Hearns

Published: 10 August 2018

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The Julia language reached the important milestone of a 1.0 release on Wednesday (August 8th). During a party in the rather swish Institute for Engineering and Technology overlooking the Thames in London, the founders of the Julia language performed a live push of the 1.0 version to Gitbub.

The significance is that the Julia language has often been criticized for changing the language in ways which break old code at minor version number changes. The recent 0.7 version was intended as a preview of 1.0, i.e. there would be no breaking changes between 0.7 and 1.0. Version 0.7 lasted around a month, and there was a lot of traffic on the Julia discussion board on how packages are being slowly updated to 0.7 compatibility. Now with version 1.0 we can look forward to a stable language - so if you have not looked at Julia yet this is the ideal time to try it.

[Note: check out the official Julia 1.0 Blog post]

Julians: Assemble!

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Written by John Hearns

Published: 08 August 2018

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The first day of JuliaCon 2018 consisted of a series of in-depth tutorials. The conference proper launches tomorrow. The venue is at the Roberts Building in UCL. As London is still baking in a heatwave I am rather glad that the lecture theatres are well air conditioned! AV facilities are rather good also. More highlights follow.