Hi, I need to help a student for a course where they teach Julia.
The student provided me with last session exam content, and the questions are really, really basic. But the topics are wide (arrays, string functions, structs…).
Where could I find exercises concerning Julia? Something extremely simple, both in the features of the language, and in the math behind… (e.g…, no code challenges sites) ??
Did you try:
Most (all?) seem pretty good at giving the basics and building it up.
Thank you, but I am not looking on a tutorial (and I have written my own one), but I am looking on exercises…
Hello, maybe on Exercism?
You basically do exercises and they get checker by mentors. Once they approve your solution more exercises are unlocked. You usually download a couple of files that run the tests you are trying to pass with your Programm and then submit your solution through their app (snap on ubuntu)
I recently finished the main Julia track on exercism and the (free) feedback I got from the exercism mentors was fantastic. Much better than paid mentorship on a udacity course I took
Please note that the julia track has now too many participants, so you can follow it, solve and submit exercises, check out others’ solutions, but without any mentoring.
Did you read this somewhere, because it is not true to my knowledge? I am a mentor on the julia track and see new student usernames daily in the submissions.
@tomerarnon, I started yesterday the julia track, and got that warning on subscribing the track… but I’d happy to be proved wrong!
edit: sadly
Request mentor feedback (disabled). This track is currently oversubscribed so requests for mentoring are currently paused. Please check back later.
I’ll look into it! That would be quite unfortunate if true because we are not (yet) overwhelmed by the number of submissions coming in most weeks, so it should be possible to allow more students. Maybe it has to do with some of the upcoming changes that I know are being planned for the platform…
I appreciate that, I guess many students are waiting before me… anyway, thanx 
Looks like the julia track is indeed oversubscribed after a very busy couple of weeks. Since the numbers are now manageable again, I expect the track to allow new students to submit solutions for mentoring soon.
Thanks @SaschaMann (and to the others from exercism who I conversed with who may or may not be part of the julia discourse community)
Wow! TIL about Exercism.
Seems like a really great platform especially being able to get feedback from mentors. Thank you everyone for sharing their experiences. I’ll check it out
A new version of exercism is under construction which will allow in-browser coding and should offer “approaches” and timely feedback from non-mentors. Here’s an archived README.md with an overview and links at the bottom.
I hope this new version will be out before the workshops of JuliaCon 2021.
I did play a bit with it, looks a great way to learn.
I have however two comments on it, one on the way the platform works and the other on the content on the Julia track.
I was curious and I chosen the “mentored” way. However once submitted the first exercise after the hello world, it is not clear what to do until receiving a feedback (that, it is stated, could take 7 days). As there is automatic testing, maybe one could be left alone to continue the track (while now the next exercises are locked while the mentor checks the answer). What I want to say is that, thanks to testing, one could have something in the middle between a full self paced and a fully mentored way… one could have self track (with automatic testing) and get help/mentoring only when requested…
Coming to the specific content of the Julia track, the second exercise in the Julia track is already pretty math-heavy. Yes, I know, and I liked it. But don’t tell me there wasn’t an easier way to explain conditional and modulo operations. Just the titles of the next (locked) exercises are full of words that are not so common outside the math or scientific domain. The problem is that the creators of the Julia track have already pick up a very narrowed category of users. These are indeed the current users of Julia, the most math conscious (and lover) ones, but be aware that you are letting away the 90% of casual, general, programmers that could still benefit of learning and using Julia in their work. This make me think to a third point that is in the middle between the platform and the content:
Could a language have multiple tracks ? The concepts of the language taught could be the same, but the examples used to teach them could match the different backgrounds of the users, one track could be for math-lovers and one for less math users… a bit like to teach English, where there are courses tailored to kids and those tailored to adults… What is taught is the same, but the example, the situations used reflect the different interest of the learners…
Whatever you did it worked, mentoring is back! TY