community.maddatascientist.io is a new Discourse site aimed at new users, primarily those who do not intend to move far into intermediate stage and do not plan on using Julia’s advanced mathematical capacities. It aims to complement this site by appealing to a less technical audience. To help the s…

People are understanding you perfectly, and that’s why they disagree. I can’t justify the entire software economy, but it makes sense to lower costs as much as possible for simple public messages among peers. A “new user” should not have to pay for random people to give possibly wrong answers, and p…

The thing about expanding a community to bring in new users is that no one wants to be the new kid in school where all the cool kids seem way above their head. Despite “there are no dumb questions,” when you see mainly questions you don’t understand there’s a natural tendency to shy away. If there a…

Specifically, we’ve taken a number of steps to try to make it less intimidating to post to New to Julia . The category name itself was actually changed in response to such a suggestion! We’ve also iteratively changed some of the messaging around the site itself with that very goal in mind, and can d…

I feel there’s a deeper set of issues that this is trying to address, that I generally agree with. There are various threads on alternative IDEs and tooling, different goals about compilation, and multiple about broadening the user base. I appreciate the motivation of @technocrat , and I might sugges…

What would you suggest instead? The idea is just to give a few examples that aim to demonstrate that the category encompasses a wide range of levels. Nothing here is written in stone, we can change things!

@MDSW I think you missed the part where I said that I killed the idea and taken down the discourse site

So it seems like this thread is turning more towards addressing what I think is a real issue of potential new users feeling intimidated and therefore shying away from Julia. This has come up on at least a couple of occasions that I recall over the years, and I am someone who has long felt this way. …

Nope, didn’t miss that. Was simply trying to point out that I believe this was a reflection of a larger discussion that has played out in other threads over the years.

I would like to be a bit of a contrarian here, but first the background on my contrarianism. I spent grade 1 & 2 in a one room school house. I remember that when the teacher was teaching grade 5, I found that interesting. When I poke around discourse I see things that are mathematically totally b…

I agree with Jake. Back when I was a student and had to scramble on StackOverflow for answers long before LLM hallucinations, I did not care about all the other domains I have barely heard of (at the risk of beating a dead horse, I do count the complimentary book on geospatial data to be an unfamili…

[ANN] A Julia Discourse Site for Non-technical Users

Community Teaching & Outreach

technocrat February 12, 2026, 4:58pm 25

I have in mind something like Julia for Excel users

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[ANN] A Julia Discourse Site for Non-technical Users

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