Empirical is statically typed. Python and q/kdb+ are dynamically typed.

I spent years using those products in finance. I would set-up a simulation that would crash after four hours because of a misspelled column name. Empirical prevents that by refusing to run a script that has a type error or unresolved identifier. No more crashed overnight sims!

You should say this under the question of how it's different than Julia.

It's not enough to say it's statically typed, since not everyone is convinced of the benefits based on the context they're coming from.

I just saw a talk by Rich Hickey about Clojure, and he eschews static typing, since he thinks of it as a coupling in a language. And based on the types of programs he writes and runs, he hasn't seen a benefit.

So I think when you're specific about what statically typed buys you in the context of the job Empirical does for you, I think it's more convincing.

I can answer for the type stable julia case, if you have a struct in julia that is composed only of primitive types this is stored as a C struct with zero overhead and fixed byte length. An array of these is then crazy efficient when it comes to streaming into the CPU etc. If you dig around the GPU support in Julia you can see this used to good effect.

> python+pandas

Another advantage is supporting sql-like syntax natively (and not having to use pandas' awkward, bolted-on API)