Does Prof. Edelman have a financial stake in Julia? He is such an enthusiastic booster of the language, that either it must be truly amazing, or there is an undisclosed motive.
Alan is one of the people who started the language (which is mentioned in the article). He is also one of the cofounders of Julia Computing (the company we formed to provide support and other services for the company). So from my biased viewpoint, the language is both truly amazing and Alan has a motive to promote the language, if only since he has a significant chunk of time and effort into making it a reality. I don't think it's fair to call it undisclosed however.
I think it's great that Prof. Edelman is dedicating his time to Julia and I hope he will be rewarded for it. However, I think that a statement of the sort you provided above should have appeared below the SIAM News article. This is something that would have been done in any major newspaper or scientific journal.
Yes, I don't disagree. I don't know why the SIAM news editors didn't. I do hope my statement here makes clarifies the facts at least for people coming from here.
