Taking a moment to introduce myself and thank you all for this wonderful community!
Have an Engineering but no CS background, and am learning Julia as my first programming language, starting maybe 8mo. ago, and it’s been fabulous!
Have watched a majority of Juliacon presentations from past few years, some more than once.
Julia is greatly affecting my thinking and methods, and it’s just the start.
Just one example is being a power Excel user for many years, and now using ODBC, DataFrames and functions to process and analyze data - WOW! (thanks @bkamins and other JuliaData collaborators!)
Another is a better view of the Opensource community, and wanting to further that along as well.
PSA for other ‘discourse lurkers’: I read as a guest for much of this year, joining just a few weeks ago. Have found the site experience as a member to be great with ability to add bookmarks (haven’t figured out how to download the list yet), and pick up where leaving off moving across platforms.
Would encourage others to join, even if in ‘read mode’.
I think there is great truth in this statement and I can fully reflect on that. Before Julia, I used to think quite categorically and focused more on the actor rather than action and environment which produces that. Also when I do derivations I now very often don’t make new names for the functions instead I look on symbols as dispatch arguments.
in my case, I actually do a lot of deep thinking and “deep mind” intelligence from my own brain (as opposed to an artificial neural network), so the compile time lag isn’t an issue for me, since I still often use that time for non-artificial thinking… which my brain thinks is more important than artificial thinking anyhow…
@chakravala, in addition to learning a programming language, also am working to finally learn some proper mathematics. Haven’t had too much free time for this lately, but Geometric Algebra is the the direction am going, so follow closely your work here on those topics.
Perhaps a bit personal and off-topic, so posting here.
Ok, this is turning into a real life-changer! Few weeks ago now, my Win10 dev laptop master boot was completely corrupted due to win update. Recovered most data, but after 2 days of wrangling, HD reformat - getting blue screens every 30min. This had all stemmed from being on the developer track, in order to get WSL2 (also requiring to pay $100 upgrade from WinHome to Win10pro to be able to use it). So spend $200 more on fresh copy of Win10Pro? A case of spending ‘good money after bad’. No more!!
Thanks to finding comments here, went full linux. @ExpandingMan was helpful with Manjaro recommendation and others with Arch. Am using Manjaro KDE and looking forward to migrating to Arch/i3 down the road. So awesome, loving it in many ways, thanks.
So, the OpenSource and FOSS has been quite liberating. In reviewing markdown editors, came again to considering Zettlr. The final decision was listening to this Video Essay by the application author Hendrik Erz.
If anyone would like to take a philosophical side-step into the impact of OS on mind and society, I highly recommend this video (has zero to do with his app):
Developing Open Source Software is a Political Act
