I think it is great to have most topics advanced, it is a fun and educational way to engage with contributors and see all the power of the language in action.
However if one of the objectives of the conference is also to broaden a bit the audience -- e.g., spark the interest of a few more R/Matlab/Python users, then I think covering some basics would be well worth 30min as a first session after the introduction. And I am sure the experts could have some fun contributing to such short session in Q&A by offering further suggestions & references. In this post<https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/julia-users/mauroy/julia-users/dtJR-YmYJcM/Rw-fBLIeQmkJ>, I had made a few suggestions on what such a 101 or rather 102 session could look like. For such a conference, a session 101 covering the detailed syntax would certainly be too basic. My vision of basic 102 is a typical workflow: read, crunch, plot, report, and write data. Look at a few basic alternatives and compare with other languages like R. If organizers & attendees agree it would not be a waste of time then I am open to contribute to such a session, like work with someone somewhat already proficient in Julia on designing & creating a simple script hitting a number of basic scenarios. I could write it in R as a comparative point but I would prefer if someone else would write the bulk of possible approaches in Julia. I think a simple working script written in Julia and other languages like R & Matlab for comparison would be an effective way to help newcomers relate to Julia and bootstrap adoption. In this conference, such a basic & comparative session could serve as a warm up before getting into the more advanced sessions. The tutorials I see online are either too basic for the conference (i.e., going over the syntax in details) or hitting very specific scenarios. I have not stumbled upon something hitting the basic workflow in a somewhat comprehensive, simple, & practical way. Within the next few weeks, I am planning on writing my first Julia test script. I am coming to the conference. I am excited. Getting me to stick with Julia would be an accomplishment! :) On Wednesday, May 14, 2014 11:51:23 AM UTC-4, James Porter wrote: > > Hey all— > > As far as Patrick's question goes— > > It is true that a lot of the talks at the conference are going to be about > fairly advanced topics (Julia internals, a prototype Julia typechecker, > etc.). That said there will also be a number of talks that deal with using > Julia to solve some sort of technical computing problem (e.g. parallelizing > sparse matrix multiplication), which even novice Julia users will probably > be able to appreciate provided that they have some understanding of the > mathematical/scientific content. So I would say in order to get a lot out > of the conference, attendees should probably ether be relatively > experienced Julia users, or have domain knowledge in one or more areas that > Julia is used in (numerical linear algebra, statistics, machine learning, > etc.) > > As far as Luis's question— > > Yes, we've been meaning to get this information up for a while, it should > be on the website soon. > > Cheers, > James > > > On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 10:26 AM, Luis Benet <[email protected]<javascript:> > > wrote: > >> Hi, >> >> can you post some information/recommendation about nearby hotels or other >> accommodation possibilities? >> >> Thanks, >> >> Luis >> > >
