It all started with some exasperated emails. Back in 2009, a group of researchers began venting their frustration with the programming languages designed to help scientists and other researchers perform complex mathematical operations and statistical simulations without learning how to code. These programming languages were rigid and slow. If scientists built something that really worked, they’d need to rewrite the entire program in another language just to run it more quickly. The emails turned into a research project at MIT with the mission of building an easy-to-use, high-performance programming language called Julia, which is designed for scientific research, data analysis, and modeling complex systems such as jet engines, drugs, financial markets, and robots, to name a few examples. That research project turned into a lab at MIT, and the lab turned into the company JuliaHub . Along the way, Julia gained a loyal following among scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and others.…