Matrices in Julia

<i>Having only been around since 2012, Julia’s greatest disadvantage is a lack of community support.</i><p>That is true, but if you post a question to their forum, you will get swift answers, often from the core language team:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;groups.google.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;#!forum&#x2F;julia-users" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;groups.google.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;#!forum&#x2F;julia-users</a><p>Unfortunately these posts don&#x27;t always show up at the top of a google search, so it&#x27;s sometimes better to search the user group directly.

My favourite trick in Julia using matrices is the following one liner:<p>fib(n) = ((BigInt [1 1; 1 0])^n)[2,1]<p>Which defines a fast, exact, Fibonacci function. It&#x27;s so far the easiest and only way I&#x27;ve managed to calculate the 10^9th Fibonacci number.

What does this offer me that Numpy doesn&#x27;t already offer, with the advantage of not having to learn a new language?

Right now I&#x27;m using the armadillo c++ library for linear algebra. It&#x27;s quite fast (can use openBLAS too + it does some optimizations with template metaprogramming) and quite convenient to use. Julia seems really interesting though.

Is it possible to make one of the items in the matrix a variable? (And then e.g. put the matrix in an equation, expand it, and solve for the variable).