R is a widely used language for data science, but due to performance most of its underlying library are written in C, C++, or Fortran. Julia is a relative newcomer to the field which has busted out since its 1.0 to become one of the top 20 most used languages due to its high performance libraries for scientific computing and machine learning. Julia’s value proposition has been its high performance in high level language, known as solving the two language problem, which has allowed allowed the language to build a robust, mature, and expansive package ecosystem. While this has been a major strength for package developers, the fact remains that there are still large and robust communities in other high level languages like R and Python. Instead of spawning distracting language wars, we should ask the … READ MORE