Juliacon 2024

Newcomers experiences: Why do we need a stricter Julia mode🧐
2024-07-10 , While Loop (4.2)

By design Julia was designed to be familiar for people coming from MATLAB or python. This is great to attract people, however we need guardrails for people that want to develop performant packages.

This will be a series of examples of code from colleagues, how to make them more Julian and a proposal for the language to help these newcomers to write fast and extensible code.


People coming from MATLAB and python might find the julia language sort of familiar at first glance, but will not take long until they stumble upon problems stemming from bad habits coming from these other programming languages.

One example of this is this recent talk from JuliaCon Local Eindhoven https://youtu.be/RUJFd-rEa0k?si=X4FHouP7ne4Ocv4U

These bad habits are not exclusive of people coming from interpreted languages, but also from C and Java because people tend to over-restrict their code.

Sometimes both people struggle with the type system because they are not use to it and need better guardrails in order to avoid problems.

On top of the survey I will propose a few ideas to change the tools and/or the language to help new people coming to julia either seasons developers or newbies.