Hi, I convinced one of my students to do his undergrad project using Julia. The project is on multiprecision arithmetic, but this is not important. I suggested we use IJulia; for me it seems like the best environment. My student's laptop computer is a Mac, like mine.
The student was able to install Julia without a hitch. Thereafter he followed the IJulia instructions here: https://github.com/JuliaLang/IJulia.jl After adding "IJulia", he tried to start it using "jupyter notebook". At first, the menu didn't include an "IJulia" notebook option. He somehow got far enough to have "IJulia" in his menu, but his IJulia session wasn't working and he got stuck there for a whole day. It turns out that he had not yet agreed to the XCode license, but he couldn't see this because the julia error messages were not showing up in his browser. Indeed, he was getting a rapidly scrolling terminal window which he didn't notice; the server kept restarting julia and it would abort because things weren't operational. He wasn't able to decipher the problem. After I fixed his XCode problem, I tried starting IJulia via "using IJulia" and "notebook()" and saw that several packages were broken, including ZMC, and was instructed to call Pkg.build(). I'm certain this would have stymied him as well, being buried in a screenful of incomprehensible error messages. It seems to me that Julia would be more usable if partial package installation were not possible. Furthermore, IJulia would be more usable if error messages showed up in the browser instead of at the console. Thanks, Sébastien Loisel
