Great tutorial, Daan - I think you are onto the right idea focusing on dispatch and typing. I liked your example of where value types could be useful, as well as stressing that the only reason to add types to arguments is to take advantage of dispatch.
Here at Cambridge the mathematics students do a computer-aided project in their third year, for which the language of choice seems to be Matlab, but I was looking at the list of projects the other day and thinking it would be fun to give them a try with Julia. On Thursday, 5 November 2015 09:47:10 UTC, Daan Huybrechs wrote: > > I have recently given a Julia introduction to a group of numerical > analysts at the university of Leuven, Belgium. For this, I have written a > set of notebooks, and they are available here: > > https://github.com/daanhb/Julia-tutorial > > The goal of the tutorial is not to survey syntax and features of Julia, > but rather to introduce the concepts of type inference and multiple > dispatch to people with a background in technical computing and a mindset > of object-oriented programming. That makes it a bit orthogonal to existing > introductory material, I think. The contents reflect (hopefully) the main > messages of the paper "Julia: a fresh approach to numerical computing". > > We did three one-hour sessions, using Juliabox. Juliabox is really Very > Convenient! This is not enough to learn Julia, but it gives a feeling for > what to expect once you do, and to decide whether it is worth it to pursue > further. Which of course it is - Julia easily sells itself, especially to > the audience I had. > > > Feel free to use and adapt, > Daan > >
