Julia's growth is making free JuliaBox unsustainable

Community
81

Personally, I think that for longer courses (not just 2h tutorials) students should just install Julia and IJulia locally. I consider it as a part of the learning process. It also has the advantage that it scales in the end.

In my experience, the installation is completely painless in 85-90% of the cases. I even created a little WorkshopWizard.jl in case someone really wants a (almost) “one command” installation. As indicated by the troubleshooting section of the docs almost all remaining installation issues (again, less than 15%) are due to old python versions or IJulia not finding the correct one. These are likely to be solved by setting ENV[PYTHON] appropriately.

For short, beginner tutorials JuliaBox/JupyterHub or something similar seems like the best choice to me.

10 Likes
82

Yes, my teaching was short: just two double lectures. If it was for a whole course (with a focus on coding), I’d also get them to install Julia.

1 Like
83

We had very good experience with that. Our IT already runs this for R, so it was relatively easy to convince them to add Julia. This is a great fallback even if most students bring in laptops and install Julia; actually the latter alleviates the workload on the server, so it is a win-win.

2 Likes
84

FWIW, I forgot to mention that I also created a youtube video showing how to install Julia + IJulia manually on Windows.

4 Likes
85 
]add IJulia
using IJulia
notebook()

?

1 Like
86

Conceptually, yes (+ how to install Julia in the first place + how to create a new notebook in jupyter). It is a pedagogical video. I don’t think I have to explain why handing out these three lines might not be enough for many beginners.

4 Likes