Getting Started with Julia

In this lecture we will start talking julia! We will go through a series of notebooks in tutorial style. Here is again a table with pre-rendered notebooks for you to look at:

Table of Contents

Arrays

Modern Julia Workflow

What is below used to be my way of getting you started. I think MoJuWo does a much better job at this, so I am switching you over to their content instead. click here

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I asked you to install the julia-vscode extention for the vscode editor initially. Today we'll have a first look at this environment. Some things we'll go over are:

1. How to start a julia REPL

2. How to run code line by line

3. How to run a file

4. Package environments

5. More advanced features (already couple of months back, but still) are explained in this video by one of the package authors.

Julia Modules, Packages, Pkg.jl and Environments

1. What is a module?

   • A separate name space.

   • We can group together functions from different files using the include.

   • Notice there is no relationship between function names and file names, like for instance in matlab or python.

   • you decide what is exported from the package, if anything, with the export keyword.

module MyExampleModule
using Statistics   # if any imports
include("files1.jl")
include("functions2.jl")
include("data.jl")
export xyz_fun   # if any exports
end # module

2. What's a package?

   • Basically, a module.

   • Why do we need packages?

   • Here an Example

3. The problem with user-contributed packages and open source software is that there is no central authority imposing a strict versioning.

   • [Why not? 👉 Because thou shall not force volunteers to do stuff (Benabou and Tirole).]

   • For example, my package could depend on a feature of your package.

   • You decide to remove that feature.

   • My package breaks.

   • Now what?

4. What do other open source languages do here?

   • R: nothing. You install whichever version you want and hope it all works. Latest versions is a good idea.

   • python: versioning problem comes even before packages! Python 2.7 incompatibel with python 3.6. So we have virtual environments for different python versions

     • It can get complicated really easily.

5. What is an environment

   • It's like a box inside which a certain set of versions can be assumed.

   • It's great for reproducibility: you know exactly which set of versions produced which set of results.

   • A docker container is an example of an environment in a remote data center, where you specify what kind of machine you want and what software should be available.

6. julia: Pkg.jl package manager.

   • Environments are specified in a text file Project.toml at the root of a given package or folder.

   • It specifies the required packages to run the current project (or whatever code you have in the current folder)

   • You can see an example here

   • A second file called Manifest.toml specifies the exact list of dependencies that are implied by the packages you rely on in Project.toml.

   • Including both Project.toml and Manifest.toml in a folder provides an exact snapshot of the code needed to reproduce the results.

   • It's a major step ahead to improve reproducibility of results.

7. Demonstrate how to activate a package in REPL.

8. Show some ] package manager commands and help

Notebook Formats

You will notice that there are two different notebook formats in our course: the new Pluto.jl format, and the more traditional jupyter notebook. Here's a quick video of how to launch a jupyter notebook server on your computer to run those notebooks - on the example of our course content.

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Last modified: November 04, 2024. Website built with Franklin.jl and the Julia programming language.