Blog Posts

[Edmund Jackson]

Hi Folks,

   I don't know what the accepted Julia practice is to collect/advertise julia-centric blog posts, so I'm just going to boldy post here that I blogged a bit about simple regression in Julia at http://boss-level.com/?p=247

Please forgive me if there is a less obnoxious way to do this, and let me know what it is for the future.  If there isn't a way, maybe we should think about a central place to aggregate the Juliaverse ? 

Edmund

[John Myles White]

This is how we've done it in the past. Nice post!

-- John

[Stefan Karpinski]

That's a great post – it's really lovely to see all of these things put together like this. Sometimes, being as close as I am, it's hard to see the forest for the trees, but this forest looks quite nice. I particularly like the way you can pass the posterior distribution around as an object and then sample from it so easily – or take a PDF or whatever else you'd like to do with it – I think this is *the* killer design feature of Distributions, and of course immutable composite types make it practical. The understated use of both functional idioms and Unicode names are very pleasant – no monads, just passing function objects around here and there.

We were considering making the ~ operator capture expressions and make y ~ x + x³ be equivalent to something like @tilde(y, x + x³) so that you can capture the expression like you can in R. I'm still amenable to that. (There's a bigger problem with expression indexing in DataFrames, which should really be a special operations because you need the DataFrame object itself to correctly determine which names are columns and which are external.)

It occurs to me that this would be a great post to do up in IJulia/IPython Notebook since you can mix code and MathJax-formated text easily. I may have to take a crack at that.

We should definitely have a page on the Julia website where we collect links to blogs and videos of talks and such.

Was there anything else that really chafed while you were doing this?

[John Myles White]

Once 0.2 comes out, I'd like to make the tilde operator to tilde macro call a priority. It will make GLM much nicer to work with.

 -- John

[Stefan Karpinski]

Hacker News thread about this blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6340200.

[Viral Shah]

That is indeed a really nice blog post - and well-articulated.

-viral

[Edmund Jackson]

Thanks for all the positive feedback, this is a great community.

- Distributions: Just lovely.
- IJulia:  I actually started there, but gave up stupidly.  I'd be happy to rewrite it in that way.
- Blog Aggregation:  In Clojure we have www.planetclojure.in which is powered by (https://github.com/ghoseb/planet.clojure).  This works a charm.
- A tilde macro would be great
- Chafing:
    - Surprisingly few problems, and most of them stemmed from my Julia, at 2 weeks old, needing to be refreshed - oops!
    - The only real problem was the lack of namespaces: I had Winston and Gaston clobbering another repeatedly.
    - Small thing: compared to Clojure I missed destructuring of function arguments.  I'm guessing the Match.jl machinery may be recruited to provide this ?

Edmund

[Viral Shah]

While we do have modules, I guess some bad stuff may be going on when loading multiple packages which export similar interfaces. People usually have one or the other, but there is no reason to have the clash.

-viral

[Kevin Squire]

Since they provide similar functionality, that's probably to be expected.  But you can always do

import Winston
import Gaston
...
Winston.plot(...)
...
Gaston.plot(...)

or even

import Winston: FramedPlot, Curve, display
import Gaston: plot
...
p = FramedPlot() # from Winston
...
plot(...) # from Gaston

It could possibly be made a little easier, but there's a fair amount of flexibility there.

Are you looking for a way to temporarily drop into one namespace or the other, or something else?  If there's something obviously missing, try filing an issue.

I'll add a pointer to an issue on import aliasing: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/1255

Cheers,

   Kevin

[Randy Zwitch]

I haven't read the post yet, but how does everyone feel about getting something similar to www.r-bloggers.com going for Julia? I'd be willing to set up a site or contribute however, I just didn't want to step on anyone's toes/co-opt the brand.

[Stefan Karpinski]

Ideally, this will be resolved by having a unified graphics framework – `plot` should be a generic function that is shared by all packages that need to do plotting.

[Edmund Jackson]

Thanks again Kevin, that's very useful, particularly the aliasing.

[John Myles White]

I'd be in favor of that. Although I have mixed feelings about r-bloggers, it's clearly been very influential in the R community. Emulating it is probably worth doing.

 -- John

[Jeff Bezanson]

The Winston plot in that post is totally awesome.

[Stefan Karpinski]

Yeah, it's a really cool plot.

[Stian Håklev]

I was actually planning to write and suggest something similar - I find r-bloggers incredibly useful (and also enjoy other kinds of "Planets", I used to follow kde-planet quite closely when I was using kde, etc)... I'm also planning to write some blog posts about Julia, and knowing that they'd be featured somewhere where other people interested in Julia might have a chance to see them, would be an incentive (none of my "regular readers" probably use Julia).

I also think showcases of nice notebooks would be great - like this https://github.com/ipython/ipython/wiki/A-gallery-of-interesting-IPython-Notebooks

(rpubs.com is also a great site sharing people's knitr documents - unfortunately no tagging, search, social features, but I've still found some very neat tutorials there. I wonder how hard it would be to use knitr with Julia - or to port it. The Notebook style is good for some things, but I am very used to and really like R+knitr to generate reports etc). 

[Stian Håklev]

Here's my first attempt at a Julia blog post (very simple stuff, I'm just learning): Fun with Julia, metaprogramming and Sublime Text http://reganmian.net/blog/2013/09/29/fun-with-julia-metaprogramming-and-sublime-text/

Stian

[John Myles White]

Ok. I just registered juliablogs.com for us to use. Happy to do some of the coding / design, but would love to work on it with some other folks.

-- John

[John Myles White]

This is a great post. I think learning some of the metaprogramming details you're interested in (particularly those involving more complex reflection) requires a lot of exploration of the source code, since we're not documenting the inner guts of things like MethodTable yet. (And probably for good reason since those things may shift in the future.)

-- John

[Randy Zwitch]

Hey John - 

I spoke with Tal from r-bloggers on how the plugins he's using for WordPress that automatically re-post blogs; if you're willing to use WordPress, I've got experience there and happy to help.

Randy

[John Myles White]

I'd love to hear more about what he's doing. I'd like to try to avoid WordPress, but it is often the best solution. (I use it for my own blog and can never put in the effort to get rid of it.)

-- John

[Iain Dunning]

Host it as a static-site-generator site, get bloggers to submit pull requests to add new posts, auto-rebuild site on commit - would be my thoughts for the 2013 way to do it, I guess.

[John Myles White]

I like almost all of of that, except for the pull requests: I suspect many people (including me) wouldn't be willing to put in that effort, but are happy to let an RSS spider repost their content.

-- John

[Randy Zwitch]

He's using the FeedWordPress plugin, which appears to be all that you need.  The alternative would be to use any blogging platform and create accounts for any interested party, but then someone needs to actively publish the posts (I would assume that even under the best intentions, it wouldn't be wise to have every account have direct posting ability).

[Stian Håklev]

I think by far the easiest thing is to have people submit keyword-filtered RSS feeds (ie. all the posts on my blog tagged with Julia), and then use a freestanding planet, or WP with a plugin. I love git for software collaboration, and am interested in exploring it for open academic collaboration, but I don't think a pull-request is the right metaphor for all kinds of collaboration.

Again amazed at the speed of this community. On my first day of using Julia, I had problems getting BinDeps to work with IJulia... I made a tiny reproducible example and posted on #julia, and within two minutes, the author of BinDeps had acknowledged the problem, updated BinDeps and committed to GitHub! Dizzying :) 

Stian

--
http://reganmian.net/blog -- Random Stuff that Matters

[Ivar Nesje]

It is possible to use the Pull Request model for updates and moderation, but still provide a simple way for bloggers to register their blog or blog post.

* A simple form to register URL that would somehow show up in the moderators reading list. 

* A social media #hashtag that would be monitored.

I would love an RSS feed that I could subscribe that shows (editorial?) summaries that link directly to the blog.

[Stefan Karpinski]

I'd put a vote in for using github and jekyll. That's how julialang.org works and it's really quite nice, imo. I *really* like using git for managing edits and collaboration.

[Viral Shah]

I'd like to put in a vote for jekyll too for the same reasons.

-viral

[John Myles White]

I'm not sure you guys are envisioning a website that behaves the way that R-Bloggers behaves.

(1) R-Bloggers involves no collaboration.
(2) R-Bloggers involves no editing or supervision.
(3) R-Bloggers is exclusively an aggregator that takes in tagged RSS feeds and inserts them into a Wordpress database.

I could be convinced to use a more active editorial model, but it's not clear to me how to use Jekyll/GitHub for the model that R-Bloggers has adopted. Are the imported RSSs feed turned into pull requests automatically? Do we have to approve posts before they go live?

-- John

[Randy Zwitch]

I'm definitely not in favor of using a git based solution. For code, I can see the value of version control, but for formatted writing it seems a ton of effort for little gain, whereas the RSS aggregator model lets everyone continue to post their articles using their normal workflow.

[Viral Shah]

I see what John is saying - this would be an aggregator site and automated.

-viral

[svaksha]

On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 2:17 PM, John Myles White
<johnmyl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I like almost all of of that, except for the pull requests: I suspect many people (including me) wouldn't be willing to put in that effort, but are happy to let an RSS spider repost their content.
>

If you are looking for a blog post aggregator there is Planet
Venus[0][1] - it allows you to aggregate multiple planets* in a single
installation.

[0] The Planet Venus site, http://intertwingly.net/code/venus/docs/index.html
[1] The code, https://github.com/rubys/venus
* Read, you can have a distinct planet for aggregating different types
of blog posts. Ex. You have two aggregators,
"http://julia-users.juliablogs.com" and
"http://julia-dev.juliablogs.com", then each poster can tag their
posts appropriately and be aggregated in the respective planet.

HTH, ॥ svaksha ॥