Julia Advice to Curious Python Developers

Are you a long term Python developer and interested in exploring Julia?

This is an random assortment or remarks based on questions and observations I have made of people transitioning to Julia from Python.

What Julia Version Does a Course or Book Need to Cover?

The current version of Julia is 1.6, and certainly you want to learn the latest version. However, good books or courses may not have been made for the very latest version. What to look out for?

Anything made prior to 1.0 will be more difficult as there has been a number of syntax changes. Curiously, I still get positive feedback from people who have watched my video course: Getting Started With Julia.

It has surprised me since that course was made for Julia v0.5, but many viewers have made it work anyway, by simply looking up the changes. However, this may not work for all. The safest bet is any course or video made for Julia 1.0 or higher. Above 1.3 is ideal as some important changes happened then. My more up-to-date Julia for Beginners book mostly targets v1.5.

Ultimately you have to balance how good you think the teaching material is against how up-to-date you want it.

What Development Environment Should I Use?

Today the most recommended environment is VS Code. It has the strongest Julia support and lots of people already use it. But what if you think VS Code is a bloated memory hog and don’t want to use it? Will Julia be impractical to use without it? Not at all. In fact, I personally use a much simpler text editor TextMate. The trick is to understand how you use simple editors effectively together with Julia’s interactive command line (REPL).

I made this video specifically because it is hard to get across in writing how you work effectively with a dynamic language in a command line. Even if you are an experienced…