02/10/2025 –, Salle café
Langue: English
You and I both think Julia is the best language! Faster than Python, more flexible than R, better syntax than C++. So why are these other languages still dominant in scientific computing, and growing? Why is it a "weird choice" to teach your class in Julia?
This talk explores what Julia could look like if we designed it entirely for future users. Drawing from the Pluto project's work with students and teachers, plus lessons from other language ecosystems, I'll share a vision for making Julia's technical advantage actually accessible to the people who could benefit most from it.
If Julia is so awesome... (it is!) then why is adoption in the scientific community not exploding? Sure, Python and R will be popular tomorrow simply because they are popular today. But there's more than that! Accessibility is key! What if we work on Julia with the belief that it will be picked up by more scientists five years from now? What would we work on next?
Working on the Pluto project, we focus on students, teachers and new Julia users. We see how they benefit from using Julia, but we also see the hurdles when getting started with the language. Julia can be hard to learn, especially when your background is not in mathematics. We follow Julia's development closely, and it can be frustrating to see so few core projects to tackle this. It feels like we're optimising for expert users while the next generation of scientists is learning Python instead.
I would like to share a vision of what Julia could look like in 5 years, if our focus was entirely on future users. We could have a version of Julia that any scientist could pick up – code that stays reproducible by default, documentation that welcomes different backgrounds, AI-assisted learning tools and first-class developer tooling.
Julia is the solution – the best language for our world's future scientists. Let's make sure they know how to use it.
🌼 Main developer of Pluto.jl, currently working at TU Eindhoven to develop the course Bayesian Machine Learning.
Come talk to me at the conference! I would love to learn more about what you are working on :) If you are teaching using Julia, definitely come talk to me!