There are now 13 issues with the "intro issue" label. I would be interested
in any comments on how people feel about the calibration of these.

I have to say that after looking through a large fraction of the open issue
list (titles), I basically agree with Stefan's assessment in the other
thread that the truly low-hanging fruit gets dealt with pretty quickly. In
part this is because we have developed a reflexive response of saying "want
to submit a pull request?" when such an issue is submitted -- which usually
does elicit a PR from the submitter or someone else in fairly short order.

On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 6:41 AM, Tamas Papp <[email protected]> wrote:

> I am a Julia newbie, currently diving into the internals so that I can
> contribute later. Many design features of Julia are novel, and in flux,
> which makes it harder to contibute. Even when an issue seems simple, I
> am always concerned that there are ramifications I don't yet
> understand. Identifying issues which don't require such a deep
> understanding of Julia would be great.
>
> So I would find Tim's suggested interpretation of the "newbie" label
> practical and useful.
>
> Best,
>
> Tamas
>
> On Fri, May 08 2015, Tim Holy <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > 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
>
>

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