Julia's growth is making free JuliaBox unsustainable

CoCalc provides a Julia environment you can use online CoCalc – Julia Packages in CoCalc

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Note that JuliaBox and similar are convenience services. If funding for such a service is a problem, one can always just install Julia on a computer for each user — it is free software, and the whole thing just takes a few minutes.

I don’t understand the problems people have with the price (and here I don’t mean to single out your comment). I understand that it can be a significant amount of money in some contexts (I grew up in an Eastern European country), but an analogy that comes to mind is eating out in a restaurant vs cooking a meal from scratch at home. You get the something to eat in both cases, it’s just that the first one may be more convenient, and one pays extra for that.

The key point in this topic is that providing this convenience service takes hardware and labor, and neither of them is free. Some users will find that it is cheaper to outsource these things, some won’t. Both can be sensible solutions in their place. But in the long run, it is not possible to get the convenience service unless someone pays for it.

I also understand that some people argue that providing a free web platform for Julia can help with spreading the language. But I am sceptical about this too, for the following reason: learning even the basics of Julia takes a few hours, and installing it on a PC takes a few minutes. If the second one is a barrier to entry for someone, surely the first one is too, and to a much larger extent. Julia is not a language that magically shines after 5 minutes of experimentation (quite the opposite, it requires significant investment for the gains to materialize). So if someone is unwilling to even invest the time it takes for a local installation, they may be the kind of person who will be very disappointed with Julia anyway.

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An update on the time scales of this would be great. Until when (roughly) can we rely on juliabox to be working for free?

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Update on this front. With the Julia community growing, many others are offering a hosted Julia service:

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My local uni is deploying a JupyterHub instance for use by students, which has not been made public but which I have access to. They have installed a few julia kernels for different julia versions, and it all works nicely.

The only hickups for users are due to the fact that JupyterHub is based on JupyterLab: packages like Interact.jl that haven’t yet caught up with the switch from jupyter notebook to jupyterlab.

It did take the cluster admins some work to figure out that they need to be careful about not leaking global/central JULIA_DEPOT paths into the depot paths of user sessions, so that when users add packages those get installed in folders they are privy to. It was mostly smooth sailing after that from what I can tell.

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See also here for the julia specific announcement for mybinder.org.

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Don’t forget

which is my favourite so far. It can persist the image, so you can pacakgeCompile afew packages and save them. I have requested a $10 a month tier that is more aligned with the silver in Juliabox.

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We should probably note all these on julialang.org.

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Did anyone read this blog post about the struggle of open source within academcy and CoCalc? Makes me want to support Cocalc. I had a spin of their Julia notebook and it has DataFrames and Plots pre-installed. It’s a bit slow but it’s the unpaid tier.

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I saw it pop up on slack. Since this conversation originally started I’ve discovered a lot of different ways to make code interactive online. It seems like an increasingly saturated market. I wonder how important it will be to have JuliaBox as these services continue to grow.

Very. Like the simplicity and Julia focus of juliabox.

Btw, Nextjournal also has a strong focus on Julia :wink:
I’m basically full time employed to improve Julia’s usability at Nextjournal :slight_smile:
If you find anything Julia related that works sub optimal, let me know!

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I think Makie.jl (sure, on NextJournal) needs more work. Please spend 90% of time on Makie. Thanks :wink:

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I’m personally very happy with how Simon allocates his time :slight_smile:

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I am greedy and think Makie is the best thing ever and want more of it :smile:

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Would be nice to have more images eg with key data science package pre compiled! I am trying to make some

I appreciate the need to keep JuliaBox financially viable. However, for academics trying to introduce Julia to students, the current subscription model will mean that we will have to remove our coding courses that rely on JuliaBox, and this means that lots of students will forgo an introduction to Julia.

What about providing 100 hrs free per year, then some kind of pay-as-you-go option thereafter, e.g. $7 for an additional 100 hrs.

This subscription model would not preclude those of us who do not receive financial support to run our courses and continue to introduce students to Julia.

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I don’t even know what JuliaBox is, is it possible to “donate” to you core dev’s at Julia? Or is it preferred that people just buy some licenses?

Server costs are some serious stuff.

How many students do you have in a classroom using JuliaBox? I’m just curious.

We had 15 student in the cohort this year, but it depends on enrolments. We were considering implementing the workshop in another course which typically gets about 50 students, but that is up in the air at the moment.

The issue isn’t really for these students, because they could sign up for a 30 day free trial of JuliaBox for the workshop. The issue is for the academics (me and my colleagues) who requires the use of JuliaBox to maintain the course and update it, typically for only 2 weeks prior to the workshop. We also might introduce the odd research student to JuliaBox before they eventually download a local version of Julia, which typically might be the odd login sporadically 3-5 times throughout the year. We are not heavy users of JuliaBox, I think 100 free hrs per year of use would enable us to continue introducing students to coding in Julia.