Sheehan, That's a very nice looking course but I think you are very brave
to use Julia at this stage.
I love the language but (at this stage of the language's development) the
error reporting is highly problematic. For example this morning I made a
classic mistake
function foo(a::real) # Should have been: function foo(a::Real)
...
end
The function was defined at line 998, the error was reported at line 433,
565 lines away! The message was
"ERROR: LoadError: TypeError: Tuple: in parameter, expected Type{T}, got
Function"
Good luck to your students!
Working in Julia requires a practice of defensive incremental coding in the
extreme. Every few lines of code that are added need to be tested before
carrying on. That way you know that any errors are in the few lines of
code that were just added and not at whatever spurious location was being
suggested.
Let me say again I love the language. However the error reporting is a
source of extreme frustration to me.
A key pathway to getting Julia more widely adopted would be for it to be
used for teaching purposes. However, at the moment I fear that any attempt
to do so would surely end in tears.
Peter Kovesi
On Friday, April 15, 2016 at 10:17:40 AM UTC+8, Sheehan Olver wrote:
>
>
>
> I'm currently lecturing the course MATH3076/3976 Mathematical Computing at
> U. Sydney in Julia, and thought that others may be interested in the
> resources I've provided:
>
> http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au/u/olver/teaching/MATH3976/
>
> The lecture notes and labs are all Jupyter notebooks. I've also included
> a "cheat sheet" of Julia commands used in the course
>
>
> http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/url/www.maths.usyd.edu.au/u/olver/teaching/MATH3976/cheatsheet.ipynb
>
> The course is ongoing (it's about half through) and will continue to take
> shape, but any feedback is of course welcome!
>
>
> Sheehan Olver
>
