On Fri, Dec 05 2014, ivo welch <ivo...@gmail.com> wrote: > the most immediate problems for using julia in teaching (instead of R) are > (a) the lack of local experts and (b) the lack of books. perl won out > around here because of two books: Learning Perl and the Perl Cookbook. I > can't emphasize enough how much these two books did for perl adoption. R > is tolerable only because it has such a terrific and deep support group > (mailing list) on the internet.
I wanted to switch to Julia (from R) for a teaching course (computational methods in economics), and decided against it for now, for the following reasons: 1. plotting is not (yet) comparable, 2. debugging in Julia is currently more difficult than R, 3. the library syntax is a moving target. Still, given the pace the master branch is moving at, I guess a year from now Julia will be ready for teaching a course to non-CS students. I am very much looking forward to this, R has a lot of quirks and traps that distract students from the course content, Julia has a much more consistent design. Best, Tamas
