Introduction

Overview

Questions

• What can we except from this course?

Objectives

• State what this lesson aims to teach.

This lesson is an introduction to the Julia programming language for persons who already have experience in other programming languages.

We start by placing Julia within the world of all programming languages by looking at properties usually used to classify them.

Then we go through the language types and other important constructs. We will learn about it’s syntax along the way and, with few exceptions, mostly implicitly. This part will be rather fast paced, with the assumptions that you learners will have gone through the same learning process for other languages before and draw analogies. Because of time constraint we will also only touch the surface of many topics. There is, however, extensive documentation.

Finally, we will have a look at how to idiomatically setup a Julia project, either as a library or an application.

We will teach and learn through participatory live coding, that means the instructors will write code in a Julia REPL so that you can see it. They will write slowly and will explain everything that they type, so that everytone can code along while understanding what they are doing.

REPL

REPL is an acronym for Read-Eval-Print-Loop. A REPL reads a string from the user, evaluates it in some form, prints the result of the evaluation and loops back to the start.

We we start, for example, Python in a console without arguments, we start a REPL; the prompt, >>>, waiting to read our commands in the form of strings we type.