It seems Microsoft is offering a complete ready to go software bundle for any Data Scientist in the form of a Azure Virtual Machine called the “Data Science Virtual Machine“.
Just looking at the list of pre-installed software, you have some of the common modern languages and frameworks already in the VM, so all you need to do is connect to your data source and start working:
I first heard of Julia from Kaggle’s “First Steps With Julia” competition and started looking around some of its features while on julialang.org and at that point I thought that it was maybe a replacement for R or even a more hardcore version of R developed especially for scientists.
But recently I read a blog post from Microsoft’s Cortana Intelligence and Machine Learning Blog on Julia – “Julia – A Fresh Approach to Numerical Computing” and I have to say that I feel like the tide will turn in a year or so and we will see a rapid adoption of Julia in the Machine Learning community.