Again, thanks all for your thoughts I will definitely get that book as well.
As I was taking an ‘exercise break’ I got an idea, which I don’t think would offend anyone’s sensibilities, and might be helpful (if a little crazy).
What if a ‘Lite’/‘Juliette’/‘Newbie’ mode could run the same as Julia, but focus on a different approach to error messages?
I think most of my (&others’?) frustrations can be boiled down to not being able to get things to run, and not having a clue about how to fix them. What if there were an AI-trainable debugger mode which would attempt to make suggestions in case of an error and would keep track of (willing) users’ errors, having them rate the usefulness of the suggestions, with a view towards such support getting better over time?
Hopefully, this wouldn’t deflect too much of developers’ time away from the ongoing development of Julia itself, and could help train an expert ‘assistant’?
Such a system could be trainable on the cloud or by having users (voluntarily) send periodic logs.
Is this a crazy idea?