MIT’s Free Online Course to Learn Julia — The Rising Star
By: Frederik Bussler
Tags: Python, Julia, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Data

MIT’s Free Online Course to Learn Julia — The Rising Star

And why you should take it.

Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

Background

Python is the unchallenged leader of AI programming languages, used by 87% of data scientists. That said, there’s no guarantee of Python’s future, as languages come and go all the time — COBOL, ALGOL, BASIC, the list of graveyard languages goes on.

Indeed, Jeremy Howard — AI expert and former President of Kaggle — says that “Python is not the future of Machine Learning. It can’t be.” In short, native Python is too slow and there’s too much overhead.

Julia is faster, comes with a nicely designed type system and dispatch system, and has a lot of potential in the future of AI.

While you don’t need to know programming to do AI, given no-code AI tools like Obviously.AI, Julia is a handy skill to have as a developer.

Learn Julia From MIT

MIT recently announced a free online course on computational thinking, taught using Julia.

Ask yourself this: What programming language have the courses you’ve taken been taught in? Almost all data and AI courses are taught in Python, with a small number taught in R and other languages.

That’s what makes this course stand out, besides the fact that it’s tackling a very timely issue: The spread of COVID-19.

Syllabus

The course includes topics on analyzing COVID-19 data, modeling exponential growth, probability, random walk models, characterizing variability, optimization and fitting to data, and more.

A famous quote by Albert Bartlett says:

“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”

This course will teach you how to understand and model exponential functions, which is useful far beyond the spread of disease, into financial markets, compound interest, population growth, inflation, Moore’s Law, or even the spread of wildfires.

Knowing Julia is a Career Advantage

Building a successful career is all about supply and demand. The lower the supply: demand ratio, the more opportunities you’ll find.

For example, more people can be a cashier than there is a demand for cashiers, which is why those jobs typically earn minimum wage. On the other side, very few people have the skills to be an anesthesiologist, which is they have extremely high earnings.

Let’s put this into practice.

As of writing, when you search for the title “Python Developer” on LinkedIn, you get around 23,000 results. When you search “Julia Developer,” you get hardly any. Of course, many people have downloaded Julia, but there aren’t many specialists.

The top LinkedIn group for Julia developers, called “The Julia Language,” has 2,300 members. Meanwhile, there are 1,644 groups that mention Python. The top 10 Python groups add up to over 600,000 members:

Developers, Engineers & Techies: Python, Java, Javascript, C#, PHP | Blockchain (191,966 members)

Python Developers Community (176,164 members)

Python Data Science, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing

Group (71,432 members)

Group (71,432 members) Python Professionals Group • 59,635 members

Python Web Developers Group • 43,553 members

Programming Language (Java, C, C++, C#, Python, PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, Swift, Objective-C, R, PL/SQL) Group • 25,411 members

Python Programmer / Developers Group • 20,003 members

Scientific Python Group • 13,400 members

Epic Python Academy Group Group • 13,127 members

Python Developers Group Group • 10,270 members

In short, you’ll stand out from the crowd by knowing Julia. Currently, almost 8,000 jobs on LinkedIn mention “Julia,” including:

Summary

Julia would be a valuable addition to any tech portfolio, and this MIT course is a great way to build your skills. Many believe that Julia has a bright future in the data & AI industry, which will help CVs with Julia float to the top.