There is a lot of support and interest in automatic differentiation [1] in the Julia [2] community, partly because the language design makes it relatively easy

There is a lot of support and interest in automatic differentiation [1] in the Julia [2] community, partly because the language design makes it relatively easy to do. In fact, there is a whole "organization" dedicated to AD packages, JuliaDiff [3]. In particular there are packages for dual numbers and their generalizations, as well as reverse-mode AD packages. ReverseDiffSparse.jl, for example, uses some clever tricks including graph coloring to create very efficient Hessian matrices. You can make use of AD for more than just playing around too, esp. for optimization (JuliaOpt [4]): Optim.jl will use them to calculate exact derivatives if you don't provide them, and JuMP.jl will use them to calculate the sparse Jacobian and Hessian matrix for a nonlinearly constrained optimization problem (which can be used by, e.g. Ipopt.jl) [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_differentiation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_differentiation [2]: http://julialang.org/ http://julialang.org/ [3]: http://juliadiff.org/ http://juliadiff.org/ [4]: http://juliaopt.org/ http://juliaopt.org/