Common Lisp vs. Julia vs. Objective-C vs. Unlambda Comparison Chart

Julia was designed from the beginning for high performance. Julia programs compile to efficient native code for multiple platforms via LLVM. Julia uses multiple dispatch as a paradigm, making it easy to express many object-oriented and functional programming patterns. The talk on the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Multiple Dispatch explains why it works so well. Julia is dynamically typed, feels like a scripting language, and has good support for interactive use. Julia provides asynchronous I/O, metaprogramming, debugging, logging, profiling, a package manager, and more. One can build entire Applications and Microservices in Julia. Julia is an open source project with over 1,000 contributors. It is made available under the MIT license.

Unlambda is a programming language. Nothing remarkable there. The originality of Unlambda is that it stands as the unexpected intersection of two marginal families of languages. Functional programming languages, of which the canonical representative is Scheme (a Lisp dialect). This means that the basic object manipulated by the language (and indeed the only one as far as Unlambda is concerned) is the function. Rather, Unlambda uses a functional approach to programming: the only form of objects it manipulates are functions. Each function takes a function as an argument and returns a function. Apart from a binary “apply” operation, Unlambda provides several built-in functions (the most important ones being the K and S combinators). User-defined functions can be created, but not saved or named, because Unlambda does not have any variables.