(Not-So-)Crazy idea: Make the julia docs a Pluto notebook

As someone who still is climbing the sometimes steep Julia learning curve, I would like to add some observations

  • Some of the best learning material I found in notebooks, yet I had problems reading it at my laptop. Too much scrolling, too much wasted space. I finished by copying important parts to an normal Julia file.
  • Conveying new concepts is especially needed with Julia and its elaborated syntax sugar. Having an interactive part after a good intro would be great. But the doc should be more book than notebook, and (also) available in a very concise format like github.com/bkamins/The-Julia-Express

The real challenge (for me) is still to find what functions are available, especially package API.

  • Plots.jl doc is almost perfect, and verbose. An Express-style part with one-liners would be helpful as a quick reference.
  • Julia’s multiple dispatch and inventive commands are a real challenge to keep function information in one place. Discourse then often fills the gap. Would not have found these:

open(f::Function, command, args…; kwargs…) # open file, iterate on bytes, close file
cat(matrices…; dims=(1,2)) # build block matrices

Every effort to improve (automate?) doc accessibility is welcome and should be tried!

2 Likes

I’m for it. Pluto outputs HTML so it might be possible to use in docs already, but if pluto was the default it would be nice. I’d aldo like to see more of a depository or wiki.