I have a strong feeling that Julia will eventually oust Python for data science and artificial intelligence. The reason is this, speed and distributed computing. Python is an excellent language, even if you are not from a computing background and want to write programs, Python is a good language to start. But Julia has the following advantages.

Speed

Julia is super fast, even compared to C it has very simmilar speed with far less complicated syntax. So if you take a machine learning package in Julia, all its source can be just in Julia. Let’s take Python for example, we use numpy a lot, and at its base its not written in Python, its written in C and is wrapped with Python. That’s not Python!

If you write everything in Python, things will get really slow and your grand child will see the result of your code’s output. I don’t think people want it that way.

Distributed Computing

Julia is a new language, Python was written as a toy language for system admin purpose, Julia on the other hand is a new one and understands the modern computing needs. Distributed computing, Concurrency and true Parallelism (not multithreading), which are difficult to achieve with pure Python. Though other packages are available, they are not python.

Python for Industry & Julia for research

Now many companies that claim can do A.I work need to do it quick. It’s more easy to get Python developers, tell them to learn some A.I in 2 months and start to code. So Python may be good for industry. But think of an A.I researcher who wants to improve a learning algorithm and finds its source code in C or C++, that guy would rather write a new implementation in Julia than using those difficult languages.

I feel in slow, but in an exponential manner Julia packages will increase and root out Python in Data Science, I feel it’s only a matter of time.

Blessed by Scientific Community

The whole software industry once thought THE MICROSOFT way was the way to develop software, but the scientific industry embraced free software, now many companies are using Linux on their desktops, Linux dominates Mobile market, even Apple uses lot of free software components in its ecosystem, Microsoft has surrendered to Linux today. What was touched by the scientists, and ridiculed by the software industry won. Today I feel Julia is getting such a blessing from the scientific community.

Remember we in the software industry are here to make money with computers, though we have the brain enough to think, the mad pursuit of money and/or climbing the corporate ladder have left us with the intelligence of fighting lions and tigers. Where’s our tax sponsors these scientists who can take time to think, they do not have to fight much, outfox some one, get into office politics and meet very strict deadlines. They have intelligence of Chimps. Evolution tells that Chimps evolved into Humans who are hunting down and made Lions and Tigers almost extinct.