Setting Up Your Environment

Git

The most we will likely need to do is pull from various GitHub repos. For instance to get started with this sessions we will do

git clone https://github.com/rayegun/JuliaIntro.git

VSCode

Most of our instructors will use VSCode during their tutorials. The VSCode website is fairly well documented. If you are on MacOS and have Homebrew you can simply run

brew install --cask visual-studio-code

Juliaup

The most natural starting point to install Julia onto your system is the Julia downloads page, which will tell you to use juliaup.

1. Windows users can download Julia and juliaup together from the Windows Store.
2. OSX or Linux users can execute the following terminal command:

curl -fsSL https://install.julialang.org | sh

In both cases, this will make the juliaup and julia commands accessible from the terminal (or Windows Powershell). On Windows this will also create an application launcher. All users can start Julia by running

julia

Meanwhile, juliaup provides various utilities to download, update, organize and switch between different Julia versions. As a bonus, you no longer have to manually specify the path to your executable. This all works thanks to adaptive shortcuts called "channels", which allow you to access specific Julia versions without giving their exact number.

For instance, the release channel will always point to the current stable version, and the lts channel will always point to the long-term support version. Upon installation of juliaup, the current stable version of Julia is downloaded and selected as the default.

 juliaup add lts
 julia +lts
 

 juliaup status
 

 juliaup update
 

Test your Julia install

Run this little program 😊:

println.(1:10 .|>_->prod(j->rand(["╱╲"...]),1:10));

Julia + VSCode

Workflow

Julia supports a wide-range of workflows, although it is unique in the popularity of "REPL-driven development".