While I agree that "easy" is not always easy to define, I also think that there is real merit in flagging issues that should not require a deep dive into internals. For many first-time contributors, just learning git and GitHub is quite a barrier in itself (it was for me). A one-line fix---like adding a missing method---is the perfect warmup exercise. To a potential contributor, s/he presumably has better access to "what am I good at?" than to "what issues will not require three days of work even by someone with expertise in Julia's innards?"
--Tim On Friday, May 08, 2015 10:33:48 AM Mike Innes wrote: > 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
