I just realised that that sounds a bit prescriptivist - of course you could add types to a function if you wanted to catch errors early, rather than waiting for some deeper call to not work. There are probably other good reasons too. But the point where I realised it didn't matter if I didn't annotate everything was definitely a load off my mind when programming. So I like that you highlighted that.
On Thursday, 5 November 2015 13:52:25 UTC, Scott T wrote: > > Great tutorial, Daan - I think you are onto the right idea focusing on > dispatch and typing. I liked your example of where value types could be > useful, as well as stressing that the only reason to add types to arguments > is to take advantage of dispatch. > > Here at Cambridge the mathematics students do a computer-aided project in > their third year, for which the language of choice seems to be Matlab, but > I was looking at the list of projects the other day and thinking it would > be fun to give them a try with Julia. > > On Thursday, 5 November 2015 09:47:10 UTC, Daan Huybrechs wrote: >> >> I have recently given a Julia introduction to a group of numerical >> analysts at the university of Leuven, Belgium. For this, I have written a >> set of notebooks, and they are available here: >> >> https://github.com/daanhb/Julia-tutorial >> >> The goal of the tutorial is not to survey syntax and features of Julia, >> but rather to introduce the concepts of type inference and multiple >> dispatch to people with a background in technical computing and a mindset >> of object-oriented programming. That makes it a bit orthogonal to existing >> introductory material, I think. The contents reflect (hopefully) the main >> messages of the paper "Julia: a fresh approach to numerical computing". >> >> We did three one-hour sessions, using Juliabox. Juliabox is really Very >> Convenient! This is not enough to learn Julia, but it gives a feeling for >> what to expect once you do, and to decide whether it is worth it to pursue >> further. Which of course it is - Julia easily sells itself, especially to >> the audience I had. >> >> >> Feel free to use and adapt, >> Daan >> >>
