It seems like most of what they do is biostatistics/bioinformatics. I would show them PyCall and RCall. Knowing that you easily have all of those libraries (and your previous libraries) is great. Also show them the JuliaStats stuff.
In fact, ask them what they'd want to add to Julia if they had the time. You'll run the gambit and show them a package which already does it. This happens all the time on the Gitter: someone new comes saying "hey I want to learn Julia. It's new so it doesn't have many packages... does it have something for this? Oh it does... this? Oh it does... this? Oh..., its package system is actually pretty complete." This combined with the R/Python/MATLAB glue really makes one confident that Julia at least has enough to try on a real project (and get hooked). I'd also show them Plots.jl. It is also much nicer than other plotting libraries I've used before. The fact that you can switch backends with the same code means that you get all the new updates "for free" when backends come out (I'm looking at GLVisualize!) Definitely show them the BioJulia group. Show them @parallel and pmap. If they have HPCs, show them how to just give Julia the machinefile and together you already have multinode parallelism for embarassingly parallel problems. Last but not least, show them the community: julia-users, the Gitter channels for chatting with the devs, etc. Knowing that there's always help right there is really wonderful. On Monday, July 25, 2016 at 2:44:16 AM UTC-7, Job van der Zwan wrote: > > *TLDR: I'd like to show Julia to my colleagues, but don't have a clue > which cool packages and features I should show off to them, because I don't > do any scientific work myself.* > > Hi, > > I'm an interaction designer working for a research group at Karolinska > Institute[0]. Basically, I'm a glorified front-end webdev. I don't do any > scientific work myself, I'm just building a web-based interface for > browsing and visualizing single-cell data for them. So my use-cases don't > seem to align with Julia's strengths, but I like the design of the > language, the ideas behind the project and have been following its > development great pleasure. > > Last week while watching a bunch of JuliaCon videos during a lunch break, > one of my colleagues asked what the video was about. I tried to explain the > Julia project to him, as well as the language's strengths and weaknesses. > Sadly, I didn't really do a good job of it, since I don't actually program > in it myself. He said it looked a lot like Matlab (his language of choice) > and was interested in the free-and-open-source aspect. But he expected > there to not be enough packages yet for him to work with it and was > sceptical about whether switching to it would be worth it. I tried to > explain that Julia can call out to Matlab code with practically no > overhead, but he didn't really look convinced (and I didn't have a working > Julia environment to show it off to him either). While Jupyter was also a > turn-off, since he doesn't like notebooks, but the Juno video compensated > for that a lot. > > Basically, I'd like to show Julia to my colleagues, give them some > pointers on where it might be fun to start playing with it, what are some > of its amazing features *that matter to them*, but I don't have a clue of > what I should focus on to do so. > > The researchers I work for are molecular neurobiologists. They're doing > pretty well, having published in Science last year and this year, see > here[1] for a list of publicatiosn. Currently Anaconda is the "lingua > franca" platform, but some in the group prefer Matlab or R over Python. Of > course, one of Julia's selling points is that it's a very "inclusive" > language, so I definitely could show that, but I don't know what else to > demonstrate. I'm hoping there are researchers here with similar enough > use-cases for Julia who could give me some suggestions about what kind of > things they might really like over their existing solutions. > > Cheers, > Job > > [0] http://linnarssonlab.org/ > [1] http://linnarssonlab.org/publications/ >
