Comment by dnautics

I am using Julia to casually participate in a bioinformatics contest (I have no bioinformatics background but I am pretty darned good at coding and biochemistry). The technique i'm using involves blasting a subset of the genome with neural nets, and I'll be damned if Julia isn't fast. I haven't benchmarked it against python, but basically the program is running a hybrid swarm optimization/gradient descent technique to find 20:5:1 neural nets; it is able to find test and optimize a swarm of 100 neural nets over 50 iterations in about 2 seconds on my rather slow laptop (2.3 GHz Core i3) A friend of mine is doing the same contest (using python) and his eyes popped out when I told him how efficient Julia was.