JuliaCon 2020 (times are in UTC)

Introducing the Hispanic community to Julia
07-31, 13:00–13:10 (UTC), Red Track

This talk gives the origin and development of the Spanish translation of the open-source book “Think Julia”, titled “Introducción a la Programación en Julia”. This book focuses on teaching to program with Julia as the first programming language and is one of the first books in Spanish about Julia. The goal of this translation is to facilitate the use of Julia in the Hispanic community; the English level of most Latin American countries is medium or low according to the English Proficiency Index.


For Julia, the diversity of users is fundamental for its development and growth. Users from different backgrounds, regions, ages, and social contexts can contribute with different perspectives, and promote its usage in their context. This talk presents our experience translating into Spanish the open-source book “Think Julia”, titled “Introducción a la Programación en Julia”. The goal of this translation is to facilitate the use of Julia in the Hispanic community. We will share how we planned and executed the translation, what we learned in the process, and why you might want to do something similar.

The talk will review the choice to translate an introductory text rather than the Julia manual, including its utility to students in secondary education (high-school). A brief history of ThinkJulia will be shared, including its license and the use of Julia to verify inline code excerpts. We will review the utility of PDF and online versions (see https://introajulia.org/). "Intro a Julia" will be presented as a valuable tool for Spanish coders without English proficiency.

Pamela Bustamante is a PhD student from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She has been using Julia since her undergraduate days at Universidad del Bío-Bío, Chile. Co-author of IntroAJulia.jl