Hate to sound like a curmudgeon, but language evangelism frequently backfires, and if it is coming from a person not working in a particular problem domain, the best you can expect is a shrug. Which is fair I guess, "I don't know what you are doing but I am sure you would find language X a good match for it" doesn't sound too convincing.
On the bright side, Julia is spreading fast in many communites, so if it is useful for those scientists, I am sure they will find it on their own quickly. When they are ready; and when the language is ready. On Mon, Jul 25 2016, Chris Rackauckas wrote: > 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/ >>
