Part of the issue is figuring out what "Newbie" means. New to programming? Experienced in programming, but new to Julia? Experienced in Julia, but new to Base? New to open source? Arguably all of these are valid targets, but mixing them together ends up not being that helpful since people still have to sort through them.
I agree with what Tomas has said about writing packages. I can definitely understand people wanting to contribute to Base, but if you just want to get some code out there and/or get a taste of the process contributing to packages will be much quicker and easier. The great thing about Julia's early stage is that (a) it's really easy to find holes in functionality and (b) if you fill those holes, chance are you'll have "the package" for that functionality, and people are actually going to use it. On top of that, you're much more likely to be interested in the work. That's a really great opportunity IMO. It's easy enough to pick something you're interested in and, depending on your level of confidence, start from scratch, port it from another language, experiment, whatever. As one option, the web stack is particularly ripe for development right now. (Which is a polite way of saying that there isn't much of one.) On 8 May 2015 at 07:03, Tomas Lycken <[email protected]> wrote: > I just want to put some emphasis on what Scott hinted at: if you want to > contribute to Julia, start with figuring out what *you* know a little about. > > Sometimes there's code in base that does some of those things, but not all > of them, and/or not as well as you know how to. > > Sometimes there's not a place in base for your problem domain, but I've > found that contributing to a package (or building a new one) is just as > good a way to get started writing some Julia code. And chances are pretty > high that after a while you stumble upon something in base that needs > improvement for your package development to be as easy as possible - voila! > We've found someplace in base for you to contribute :) > > Bottom line is, it's usually pretty easy to write Julia code as long as > you know what the code should do - the hard part is finding something that > you know how to do (and where to put the code that does it). > > // T
