Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, Viral Shah, and Alan Edelman designed the Julia programming language.
The four creators began developing Julia in 2009 and released its first public version in 2012. They wanted a language combining the ease of use associated with high-level scientific languages and the performance traditionally associated with lower-level compiled languages.
Julia was designed especially for numerical and scientific computing. Multiple dispatch is one of its defining features: a function can choose an implementation based on the types of all its arguments, rather than only one receiver or first argument.
Julia is sometimes mistaken for a MATLAB replacement or a Python library, but it is a standalone language. Its ecosystem includes tools for statistics, optimization, machine learning, and technical computing, and Julia programs commonly use just-in-time compilation through LLVM.