I started building this a few weeks ago as a script for my own use, and decided to make it more public: GitHub - heetbeet/juliawin: A portable Julia for Windows, bundled with VSCode, Pluto, Conda & PyCall, and more.
What do you all think? Is this a useful pursuit or is this largely replicated by Julia Pro? If it’s worth it, I’d consider getting a better website and deployment pipeline going.
Haven’t tested it yet but I think that any attempt to bundle up Julia with Jupyter is worthwhile for teaching. In my experience, 90% of students’ issues are Jupyter (or more generally python) related. If we could avoid those that would be a big improvement!
(Will check it out soon and report back.)
An alternative route would be to drop python/jupyter and go for nteract instead. IJulia has instructions.
Although I like the idea of dedicated notebooks, last time I checked nteract was way to much in a beta state for it to be used for undergrad teaching. Has the situation changed? Is someone using it for teaching already?
I had the same impression last time I considered using nteract for teaching (Aug 2019). However, recent versions look more stable.
At this point, the only gripe I have is (a) autocomplete does not work (although there is a PR for that); (b) nteract does not update the kernelspec on saving the notebook (at least not if was earlier created in jupyter), which is a bit of a nuisance.
Cool, I’ll check it out. I think I want to go for a setup where you can pick and choose the tools you want packaged, and also build the launcher exe’s accordingly. Then you can choose jupyter or nteract or both (or none).
Add nteract to Juliawin: https://github.com/heetbeet/juliawin/issues/14