I am glad my post generated so much interest and attention.
Here I am 18 months after my first post, and I thought I would (firstly) report that my teaching with Julia in large (~200) classes has been successful, there is one serious issue that remains that has made the journey far from smooth for me, which has to do with Package Manager issues of longstanding.
In such large classes I have inevitably had a small subset (~10 per class) of students with issues, which have caused me hours of frustration. I mention them here because they are basically only two recurring ones (there had been a third which used to cause nightmares which has lately apparently been resolved).
The issue which appears to have been resolved is the interaction of commonly used packages with CSV.jl which had been resulting in it breaking in a way which was quite difficult to fix. Anyway (good news!) this one hasn’t cropped up in a long time.
The issue of longest standing is the Plots/GR issue, which dates back several years. There had been an easy solution of setting
ENV["GRDIR"]=""
which has worked up until now, but now no longer seems to resolve the issue (of Plots not finding GR).
The second recurring issue of the JuMP package breaking (see
) Unfortunately, this one has seemed pretty much unfixable beyond wiping everything
and starting over (I have chosen not to confuse this very elementary class with environments)
These appear to be the only recurring, unresolved, and longstanding issues, but they continue to
cost me many dozens of hours of frustration (mine and my students) each term.
I would be open to suggestions
Thanks