Designated Target Audience of Julia 1.0?

[johnh]

@Ward9250 I am working with a biotechnology company in Denmark at the moment. I know what you mean. Looking forward to your talk!

[iwelch]

@Liso

People don’t use it, somebody asked why and it seems to me like you have problem with honest answer.

we are a very small community, and I think we are all trying to help make julia a success (which is why we are here). I have not observed any trolls in this community, or infighting. I would have rephrased it “and I was trying to give my honest answer” rather than use the phrasing…just to keep it friendlier but retain the same meeting.

[iwelch]

@johnh

Being more constructive, there are of course Julia books, the excellent Julia documentation, beginner tutorials on Youtube.
If anyone has one though, is there a slide deck on ‘a taster for Julia’.

I hope my http://julia.cookbook.tips is useful, too, although I have to wait until 0.7 packages stabilize more before I can update to 0.7, too.

[ckoe-bccms]

Hello,

@Tamas_Papp

However, I don’t really see the point of berating provides of a free service (JuliaBox) for their terms.

I was just pointing out why I do not see at all how a service like that could ever be used in a university classroom if the students have to register themselves (which had originally been suggested). Having some type of university level subscriptions might be a way, but as you pointed out most universities will then probably opt to set up their own server.

@Tamas_Papp

It’s an alternative, if you truly find the registration requirements onerous then just don’t use it.

In theory it is an alternative, I agree. I might even mention its existence to my students so that they can use it voluntarily. But I will certainly never make that service mandatory for the reasons given.

[Tamas_Papp]

@ckoe-bccms

But I will certainly never make that service mandatory for the reasons given.

I have re-read the conversation and I think you are the one who suggested the possibility of making it mandatory; originally it was just mentioned as an alternative. So sure, don’t make it mandatory if you don’t want to, I probably wouldn’t either, for practical reasons (I would not care what the students use, as long as it is a working installation), but alternatives are always useful.

To get back to the original question:

1. If one is teaching a class at a university, it goes without saying that the students should be provided working installations by university IT on classroom machines. This is very easy to do via either Jupyter, or a Juno setup (our IT actually did both when I taught a Julia course) in a way that addresses all concerns. In addition, they can install Julia very easily on their own machines, or use a service like JuliaBox, but this should be entirely optional.

2. If this happens in a less formal setting, eg a reading group, they should do whatever they like.

The bottom line is that I don’t believe that getting a Julia working environment is a practical concern these days, especially compared to languages which require a licence serve setup, which can be very tricky.

[ckoe-bccms]

Hello,

@Tamas_Papp

I have re-read the conversation and I think you are the one who suggested the possibility of making it mandatory;

it might be that I over-interpreted the suggestion to use juliabox originally made by

@antoine-levitt

I’m surprised nobody mentioned juliabox. If you only want to do basic things it works extremely well in a teaching setting:

“Teaching setting” to me suggests standardization, how else to help your students when they have problems with the interface or you need/want to have the same julia base and package versions ? If you have standardization this further implies making things mandatory to me.

But, OK, this might have been over-interpretation of the original posters intent and then I apologize to him.

[antoine-levitt]

Again, this was a mandatory assignment and nobody complained (that was last year, possibly juliabox’s sign-in changed in the meantime and we’ll have trouble this year; we’ll see). 99% students have already given over their life to numerous providers to use a smartphone, facebook, dropbpox and other services, and don’t particularly care about signing in to yet another service. The hypothetical privacy-conscious student (whom I’ve yet to meet) is probably tech-literate enough to install julia on their own, or create a dummy google/github account; if not, they can just pair up with somebody who has a google account. But I do think it’s perfectly reasonable to say “the assignment is in julia: we advise you to use juliabox, but if you really don’t want to, install julia and we are here if you need help”.

[johnh]

@iwelch Your cookbook page says It would be silly to cut a hedge with scissors, or to cut paper with a hedge trimmer.
But cutting reams of paper with a hedge trimmer is FUN. You also fail to mention the Swiss Army Chainsaw - Perl.

[iwelch]

@johnh

Swiss Army Chainsaw - Perl.

a language without typing, floating-point matrices, and data sets is like a swiss army knife without the small knife. it sucks.

python has replaced the small knife with a needle. numpy, scipy, etc., are not first-class aspects of the language, but afterthoughts.

R has forgotten the main (big) knife. fortunately, you can do a lot of stuff with the small knife and its special tools.

C++ is like a weird ball with extension tools. it’s not clear how to hold it in a hand. (modern C++ seems to have little to do with C++ 15 years ago. I wish they deprecated more weird features, focused on the STL, and added a standard repository with open endorsed solutions.)

[johnh]

@iwelch Nonsense. A Swiss Army Knife without a corkscrew sucks. Have you ever tried to push a cork down using that thing that Boy Scouts use to get the stones out of horses hooves? Useless. You could die of thirst.

With Julia, the corkscrew is of course multiple dispatch.

[ChrisRackauckas]

@iwelch

C++ is like a weird ball with extension tools. it’s not clear how to hold it in a hand. (modern C++ seems to have little to do with C++ 15 years ago. I wish they deprecated more weird features, focused on the STL, and added a standard repository with open endorsed solutions.)

Using C++ to solve any problem always feels like a chef trying to appropriately spice food with bear mace.

[anon94023334]

To continue the language/tools analogy,

“If the only hammer you have is C++, everything starts to look like a thumb.”

[kevbonham]

@antoine-levitt

Again, this was a mandatory assignment and nobody complained (that was last year, possibly juliabox’s sign-in changed in the meantime and we’ll have trouble this year; we’ll see). 99% students have already given over their life to numerous providers to use a smartphone, facebook, dropbpox and other services, and don’t particularly care about signing in to yet another service

While true, there are neverthless regulations (in the US at least) that prevent (in principle) universities from forcing students to use third party tools that the school has not explicitly vetted to comply with FERPA (The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act).

Of course, people ignore these regulations all the time, and most of the time no one makes a stink, but if you try to be a stickler (as I do) then it can be a real pain. I had to use our institutional OneDrive account for one department and gdrive for another because the different departments had different institutional accounts for their students. Of course all students already had Dropbox and Google drive accpunts, and the ones that had to use one drive especially begged to just use gdrive, but the lawyers were insistent.

Stupid? Yes. Alas, necessary if you want to comply with the rules.