Issues encountered teaching classes with Julia for the first time

[sashmit]

@stevengj

Lots of classes are indeed very rudimentary in terms of programming — essentially they are just using Julia as a fancy calculator. I’m thinking of classes like linear algebra, statistics, physics or differential equations classes that want to show a bit of numerical ODEs, etcetera — classes that don’t teach “programming” at all (no data structures, little or no control flow besides loops for parameter sweeps, no modules or abstraction beyond simple functions…), and for which every “computational” assignment is just a set of very basic scripts in a Jupyter notebook.

That’s true. In addition think what’s benefited R and Python (in the last decade or so) are things like https://software-carpentry.org/ ‘professionalizing’ software development skillsets
(which tends to filter from one generation of students or researchers to the next with the classes they end up teaching).