Welcome to my field notes!

Field notes are notes I leave myself as I go through my day to day work. The hope is that other people will also find these notes useful. Note that these notes are unfiltered and unverified.

Development Environment in Julia

VS Code (code-server) with Julia Extension

  • I am coming from RStudio so I am very, very spoiled.
  • I like VS Code so I decided to set up a cloud-based VS code instance using the cdr/code-server docker image and layer R, Python, and Julia onto the image.
  • I am using Julia 1.6 as it mainly solves a lot of Time to First Plot problems which I suspect will cause me issues.
  • After watching some of the JuliaCon videos on YouTube, I was able to set up the Julia extension with inline results and some cool stuff like workspaces and environments.
  • It feels like RStudio! Although, the Language Server can sometimes choke up for no apparent reason, and it takes a while for autocomplete to kick in after loading a package using using.
  • Some of the great features are on version control, particularly with the Git Lens extensions. I can see how more software engineering-types will be attracted to the Julia ecosystem compared to R which attracts domain experts going in the opposite direction.
  • I’m pretty sure I can find a VS code extension for anything I need; it’s an amazingly rich ecosystem!
  • Inline results are something else! Much better than a notebook interface and better than also constantly looking at the console.
  • Debugging is quite interesting but I’m looking at debugging as simple as R’s browser(). Sadly I don’t think this is that easy.

OhMyREPL.jl

  • That’s cool! Packages can modify the REPL to a deep level.
  • ~/.julia/config/startup.jl is the equivalent of the .Rprofile file

Pluto.jl

  • This is an interesting notebook interface that I want to take a look at.