Jack Moffit (Julia, miniKanren)

As a developer and manager at the Mozilla Foundation, Jack is regularly exposed to new languages and technologies. He’s been writing for five years on a variety of topics, including most recently coauthoring Seven Web Frameworks in Seven Weeks [MD14].

miniKanren

miniKanren is not really a language in its own right. Instead, it’s a domain-specific language for logic programming. When combined with a functional programming language with macros like Clojure, the result is a striking new programming model. Often, logic programmers find it difficult to tie their logic programs to the outside world. Embedding a logic DSL in a general purpose language solves this problem. You’ll find that this combination opens up a whole new programming paradigm, and that’s why Jack chose it.

Julia

Jack chose Julia because it’s an interesting and radical departure from the work he’s been doing with Clojure and Erlang. Julia is focused on computing statistics and multidimensional math. It’s designed from the inside out with concurrency and distribution in mind. R is the dominant technical computing language today, but performance is sometimes an Achilles heel. Early Julia users have commented on substantial performance improvements in Julia based on its language features.