# I love Julia

Anette is my woman, but Julia is a pretty lovable programming language.

It’s a high level language geared toward mathematics, statistics and data science. It has a clear and simple syntax with a vast range of modules - from astronomy and chemistry to geophysics, finance and machine learning. It’s open source and can be used for anything, really.

The neatness of Julia become apparent when you launce the interpretor on the command line and type in a simple equation like:

f(x) = 2x^3 + 3x^2 - pi^(x)


…and then simply enter:

f(3)


49.99372331970018


Simply lovable.

It can be used to make amazing graphs of all kinds of data.

To get going with Julia, I decided to make a small program that takes a file with numbers and makes a neat line graph of them. It can take any number of columns of data.

A file with this content:

Mygraph
a b c
13 45 13
34 16 54
12 56 11


…would be graphed as three lines with the legend “a”, “b” and “c”. The line “a” would consist of the first column of numbers (13, 34, 12). The title of the graph would be “Mygraph”.

The output is saved as the file “JuliaPlot.png”:

Here’s the code to make this happen:

# Julia program that takes a file with values and graph them.
# The output graph is the file "JuliaPlot.png".
# The only argument taken is the file name: julia plot.jl myfile.txt
# The file must have the graph title on the first line and
# the legends on the second line. It will then make a line graph,
# one line per column of numbers.
#
# Example (This would make three lines with legends
# "a", "b" and "c" and the title "Mygraph"):
#   Mygraph
#   a b c
#   13 45 13
#   34 16 54
#   12 56 11

using Plots                   # Load the module "Plots"

gtitle  = popfirst!(file)     # Get the title from the first line
l       = popfirst!(file)     # Get the legends from the second line
l       = split.(l)           # Massage the labels to the correct format
l       = string.(l)
labels  = hcat(l...)

# Then massage the numbers, plot and save png

results = [parse.(Float64, i) for i in split.(file)]
plot(transpose(hcat(results...)), title = gtitle, label = labels)
savefig("JuliaPlot.png")


As I said, Julia is a lovable programming language :-)